Audiovisual Reader direction

Status: Intent. Date: 2026-10-03. Updated: 2026-10-04. Owner of product direction: Seth, with Mateo. Engineering task ownership is claimed separately in the tracker.

Product job

Make reading feel welcoming, coherent and beautiful while retaining usable text, reader control and reader-owned AI. Improve the website as a product in its own right. The plugin roadmap does not replace this work.

Current work and next decisions

Main through 2c71cba8 contains Seth's Home reading entrance (#388), Today selection/rotation (#387), build-time recitation machinery (#390), saved-accent CSP repair (#391), Attractor frame-quality adaptation (#392), missing-chunk recovery (#389), Fit-reading transition repair (#385) and Vault hydration repair (#384). New Home first-word loading (#393), Another reading preload (#394) and Home visual polish (#395) are also merged. Ember first-plate baking is sliced rather than blocking (#396). On 2026-10-04 the fractal flame repair (#397) and the five-room architecture redesign (#377) followed; the Reader journey to observe is now Home, Read, Library, Make and Settings. Git establishes merge and authorship; it does not establish witnessed live acceptance. The tracker links these changes individually.

Near-term work is to observe the whole entrance-to-reading journey, judge audiovisual coherence and beauty, verify narration/fallbacks, test reader controls and navigation, and reconcile the historical release ledger against today's exact release. These are acceptance packages, not instructions to implement a speculative redesign. Seth and Mateo choose concrete improvements from those observations.

Existing obligations

The release corridor and human acceptance protocol govern applicable source certification, acoustic and device evidence. Historical green counts are dated records; the tracker must not treat them as fresh measurements. Until reconciled, current gate status is unknown rather than asserted passed or failed.

The North Star records the earlier orientation/doorway philosophy. It is useful historical direction, not evidence that every proposed capability has been built. Page, narration, Workshop and source-curation documents remain accessible in the product library.

Shared foundation and independence

Reader and plugin work share Experience Program, Session, Player, source-coordinate integrity and governed instruments. Record dependencies for a concrete task, not blanket dependencies between entire product lanes. Reader improvements can proceed while ChatGPT capability research remains unresolved. Plugin release must independently prove host admission, playback and return behavior.

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Published from docs/product/READER-DIRECTION.md. Edits made here are overwritten on the next push to main.