BLOCKER. Round 3's ceiling counted LIKE-positive candidates, which is not the quantity that needed bounding. To return an empty page the engine must first evaluate every eligible row, so a no-match query came back with rows.Count == 0, ended the walk having counted zero against the ceiling, and had already inspected the entire table. Round trips and materialized rows were bounded; database work was not. Worse, a dense widened prefix could materialize 20x the candidates and make 10x the round trips of round 1 — a regression dressed as a bound. Third time bounding the wrong quantity: revisions 1-2 bounded the RESULT (a fixed LIMIT budget the widened pattern starved), revision 3 bounded the CANDIDATES, and neither bounds what the database LOOKS AT. Now the Id range is closed on both sides — `Id > @AfterId AND Id <= @AfterId + @Window` — so each round trip is a primary-key range scan of known width. The LIKE still decides what comes back; it no longer decides how much gets looked at. The walk advances by the WINDOW, never by what returned (an empty page means "nothing matched in this stretch", not "exhausted"), and there is deliberately no LIMIT in the SQL — the window caps the row count, and a LIMIT would only restore the illusion that it is doing the bounding. One indexed SELECT MAX(Id) up front stops the walk burning windows on empty keyspace. Result: at most 10 round trips and 20,000 rows inspected for any q, matching or not. New test `List_Valued_Walk_Cannot_Inspect_Past_The_Bound_When_Nothing_Matches` covers the case every earlier bound test missed — they all gave the pre-filter something to return. With a narrow pattern and a needle at row 30,000, revision 3 returns the needle (right answer, unbounded work) and this revision returns []. Paired with a positive control at row 20,000 inside the bound. The ceiling's remaining false negative (20,000 "zzz" rows then "éclair" at 20,001 -> []) is kept and still pinned: it is the documented bounded-best-effort contract at a rarer threshold, not a defect. Stale/false comments, several of them repeat offenders: - The handler still used "Zulu"/"Éclair" as the truncation example, where both orderings pick "Zulu". I had corrected the test and left the comment. Now "Zulu"/"apple" in both. - "leans entirely on the row cap" described a mechanism that no longer exists. - The escape example rendered as literal Édith/É/é rather than the escape TEXT (Édith, É, é) in both the handler and the record, contradicting the explanation it was giving. - "every accented artist was unsuggestable" overstated it: exactly three of the nine pinned cases fail 1b78dc9e (those where query and stored casing differ, so the escape texts diverge); the other six pass. The record now says what the test comment already said. - The record claimed the ordinal switch left response SETS unchanged. False — ordering runs before Take(limit), so with "Zulu"/"apple", empty q and limit=1 the comparer changes which value survives. - The_Scan_Ceiling_Is_A_Whole_Number_Of_Batches was a style preference wearing a correctness costume (a 20,500 ceiling is perfectly safe — the final window clamps). Replaced with the invariant that actually matters: the walk's own arithmetic terminates and lands exactly on the ceiling.
docs/ — task-signal map
Purpose: route a fresh contributor/agent to the minimal set of docs for the task at hand, instead of a mandatory front-to-back read. Update this doc in the same PR that adds, removes, or retitles a doc below, or that changes which sections a task signal points to.
Start here, always
CLAUDE.md(repo root) — project intro: architecture, layout, dev commands, conventions, Task Completion Protocol.docs/contributing.md— established code patterns (CQRS/MediatR, LanguageExt, the ChicoryTV SPA, EF Core dual-provider migrations, FFmpeg pipeline, analyzers, testing). Read before any non-trivial change.
Task signal → minimal sections
| Signal | Read |
|---|---|
| Session startup / "what's next" (no issue named) | docs/handoffs/chicorytv-issue-queue.md (standing kickoff — two concurrent tracks: orientation ‖ scripts/select-queue.sh 5) |
| Named-issue pickup | Skip queue selection; go straight to focused retrieval — see "Knowledge retrieval" below, then the issue body |
Adding/changing a /api/* endpoint |
docs/api-conventions.md checklist + docs/endpoint-index.md |
| Adding a ChicoryTV SPA screen | docs/spa-conventions.md |
| Scheduling / playout engine work | docs/domain-model.md + decisions catalog rows keyed sched.* (docs/decisions/README.md) |
| Concurrency / optimistic-locking work | docs/api-conventions.md §7a/b/c + docs/decisions/optimistic-concurrency.md |
| Auth / security-surface work | docs/decisions/api-auth-security.md |
| CI / release pipeline work | docs/ci-cd.md + docs/decisions/release-ci-governance.md |
| Live local run / Playwright-MCP verification | docs/e2e-local.md + scripts/e2e-local.sh |
| Adding/changing a UI-E2E browser flow | docs/e2e-local.md → "UI-E2E harness" + scripts/e2e-ui.sh |
| What does a test suite cover | docs/testing.md |
| Legacy Blazor route lookup | docs/blazor-route-parity.md (historical #91 phase (b) inventory) |
| "Why do we do X this way" / challenging a convention | Catalog-first: docs/decisions/README.md (active rows) → follow the row's link to docs/decisions/records/<area>/<topic>.md for full rationale. docs/decisions/archive/<area>/ only for "what did the rule used to be." |
Knowledge retrieval (MemPalace + catalog + Gitea)
These four rules are the seam agreed with server-management#642 (the Gitea→MemPalace exporter). They apply whether the question comes up via MemPalace, a grep, or a stale comment:
- Current conventions/decisions → catalog-first. Start at
docs/decisions/README.md; discover via theErsatzTV-Decisionswing (active) /ErsatzTV-Decisions-Archive(superseded/retired). Resolve by topic/key, never by chasing a file path. - Issue history → evidence, not authority. The
Gitea-ErsatzTVwing is historical narrative that may be stale; it never overrides current Markdown. - The breadcrumb rule (the crux behavior change). A file path named inside a historical issue
comment (e.g. "grep
docs/decisions.md2026-07-17", "see …") is a breadcrumb, not a live pointer. Find the current rule via the catalog / active wing by concept; do not treat the named path as current. (Why it's safe: still-current → in the active wing, breadcrumb resolves; superseded → the active wing returns the successor and a literal follow lands on a record that announces its ownstatus: superseded; retired → the active wing returns nothing, which is itself the signal. The validator-enforced move-to-archive/is what prevents the catastrophic "superseded rule read as current" case.) - Fallback when MemPalace is stale/down:
docs/decisions/README.mdcatalog, thenrg '^`key: <dotted.key>`' docs/decisions/. MemPalace is never authority nor sole fallback.
MemPalace is candidate discovery only — every passage is verified against its cited Markdown/Gitea
source before use. Never derive live queue state from MemPalace, #237, or historical comments; queue
state is live Gitea state, retrieved via scripts/select-queue.sh (see
docs/handoffs/chicorytv-issue-queue.md). Full retrieval contract (altitude/precedence, staleness
bounds, what's mined per issue): docs/handoffs/chicorytv-issue-queue.md → "Knowledge retrieval".
Also present in docs/
docs/domain-model.md— what the app IS: entity glossary, channel→playout→schedule/block concept map, where each concept is edited in the SPA.docs/api-conventions.md— checklist for adding/changing a/api/*endpoint (controllers, DTOs, error mapping, auth, OpenAPI regen, tests).docs/spa-conventions.md— playbook for adding a screen to the ChicoryTV React SPA.docs/e2e-local.md(+scripts/e2e-local.sh) — how to run a live local instance for manual or Playwright-MCP verification.docs/testing.md— testing map: what each*.Testsproject /websuite covers, golden-file nets, the timezone-independence rule, how to run subsets, the per-PR verification gate.docs/blazor-route-parity.md— historical record of the completed #91 phase (b) cutover: the Blazor Server UI is removed and every legacy route now 302-redirects to its SPA equivalent (or falls through to the catch-all →/app). Read it for the full legacy→SPA route inventory.docs/decisions/records/<area>/<topic>.md— one active decision record per file, YAML frontmatter (key/title/status/since/supersedes/superseded-by, plus optionalstale-after/sources— ersatztv#603), rationale prose in the body. The filename is the key, so one-active-record-per-key is a filesystem property (ersatztv#610).docs/decisions.mdand the topic files remain as the lifecycle-schema narrative plus a "Records formerly in this file" index, which is what keeps older date-based pointers resolvable. Generated active view:docs/decisions/README.md(catalog / task router) — start there. Superseded/retired records live indocs/decisions/archive/and are read only for history, never for "what is the current rule."docs/ci-cd.md— build/test/release pipeline, versioning, dependency management.docs/rest-api.md— REST API design doc for ersatztv#2 (goals, conventions, per-slice plan). Largely superseded day-to-day bydocs/api-conventions.md; read this for the original rationale.docs/mcp.md— theErsatzTV.Mcpstdio JSON-RPC MCP server (#58): how it wraps/api/v1as read + cautious-write tools, its config/env vars, auth, security posture, and the tool catalog.docs/channels.md— Channel entity field reference.docs/m3u-xmltv.md— M3U/XMLTV generation overview (ChannelPlaylist,GetChannelGuideHandler).docs/fork-strategy.md— divergence policy vs upstream ErsatzTV.docs/design-sync.md— Claude Design ↔ repo screen workflow (#92).docs/endpoint-index.md— generated REST endpoint index (method/path/operationId/summary per OpenAPI tag). Do not edit by hand; regenerated byscripts/generate-endpoint-index.py/scripts/update-openapi.sh.docs/handoffs/chicorytv-issue-queue.md— static session kickoff prompt + workflow lore. Queue state is live Gitea state, retrieved each session viascripts/select-queue.sh— see that file's standing kickoff for the two concurrent tracks (orientation ‖ selection). ersatztv#237 is a closed, archival historical tracker (superseded bystartup.parallel-orientationindocs/decisions.md) — not a live pointer.docs/tracker-retrofit-triage-237.md— audit trail for the #524 triage of ersatztv#237's 111 comments (method, per-comment classification, totals). Evidence for thedocs.tracker-comment-retrofitdecision; read it only when triaging another over-cap tracker.docs/handoffs/rest-api.md— original handoff prompt for kicking off the REST API work (#2).