designing the mobile stack view

Spent the day rebuilding the stack view for mobile. The desktop version is the soul of artlu.ai — modules floating on a canvas connected by curved wires — and most of the day was about getting that feel onto a phone without the canvas itself.

We went through six or seven dead ends. Two-pane layouts, vertical-flowing canvases, iPhone-style square tiles, banded card lists, lineage-focused dim states. Every time I went down a rabbit hole, the AI was happy to follow. Every time I told it the result felt like it was breaking the spell, it'd dutifully scratch the whole thing and start over.

The thing that kept getting lost in iteration was that the desktop stack view is visually unusual. Most product UIs are lists or cards in a column; the stack view is a node graph. Adapting it for a phone meant resisting the gravity toward standard mobile patterns — drill-downs with separator lines, banded card rows, tab strips. Every time we slipped into one of those, it was correct on the surface but wrong in the gut.

Where it landed: a grid of tech tiles, tap one to zoom into the projects using it, tap a project to expand its features and demos inline with one connector wire bridging parent to children. The live demos embed as real iframes — you can actually use the $/conv calculator or the rule-gate demo on your phone, from inside the stack view. Episodes link out to the existing short / long video guidebook pages.

The handoff doc I wrote for Codex is mostly a list of things we did not end up doing — every dead end documented so the next agent doesn't re-derive them. That's the part of build-in-public that's actually useful: not the final design, but the trail you left getting there.