Piik/docs/project-memory.md

Project Memory

Last updated: 2026-08-24

Current Product Truth

• Build private, low-latency game screen sharing for one broadcaster and a small group of trusted friends. Public or large broadcasts belong on OBS/Twitch-class services.
• A room supports one Host and up to 20 authenticated Viewers. Admission is independent of endpoint fanout and SFU capacity; the event-driven route controller must remain efficient at that bound without all-pairs probing.
• Authenticated Hosts and shipped clients are trusted media participants in these private rooms; route authority, generation fencing, and server admission remain fail-closed.
• Rooms use one bounded, process-memory model: a random free code from 1000..9999, default 24-hour configurable dormant lease, and no database or cross-restart recovery. Active sharing never expires; stop/disconnect starts the lease, the exact Host token may resume before expiry, Viewer activity does not renew it, and expiry releases the code. Process restart invalidates every room, token, invitation, password verifier, and participant.
• Viewer grants and code entry are orthogonal. Every room has an expiring token-bearing invitation; code-only entry is open | password | disabled and defaults to open with no room password after site access. The Host browser locally retains its display name, code-entry policy, optional room password, and raw Host ownership token; the server keeps only current-process digests/verifiers and never uses IP, UA, device properties, or a fingerprint as identity. Recreating after restart reapplies local preferences but produces a new code, Host token, and grant.
• Web is the current delivery target. The route release covers Browser Host, Viewer, and relay endpoints; packaged/native senders, capture helpers, shared-encode executables, and their acceptance runs are lowest-priority later work outside this milestone.
• Keep routing automatic and media distributed. Direct/peer UDP is preferred; the dedicated LiveKit SFU/UDP path is the only application fallback and is not the default topology. Screener configures no TURN, ICE/TCP, media TCP, or TLS-relayed media path.
• Every non-server endpoint uses one server-authoritative steady outbound media-copy capacity: default 2, statically configurable as 1, 2, or 3. A peer child or the Host publication consumes one slot; upstream receive is free, and SFU subscriber egress is accounted at the server. Browser role/UA/visibility does not create a separate tier, and clients cannot raise the deployment value.
• The stable routing invariants are one authoritative upstream per Viewer, an acyclic source-reachable active graph, exact authenticated route attempts, endpoint and server admission, one room-serial child operation, and bounded success, wait, or failure.
• One room controller reconciles allocation, child reparenting, and relay drain through the same operation. It finds one waiting Viewer or invalid edge and builds one deterministic tuple list. The operation owns its cursor, current candidate and reservations, fact version, plus one total deadline; only its current candidate may produce media. A prepare names that exact child, selected transport, and server-issued candidate connection ID. A usable old edge remains until the exact candidate child decodes its first new video frame. settleReady synchronously commits admission before graph promotion; success commits prepare revision P, while failure releases resources, broadcasts rollback R > P from one monotonic allocator, and advances the cursor without resetting the deadline. Exhaustion retires hard-invalid, departed-parent, or overflow edges into explicit waiting but retains a healthy bootstrap edge. Bounded-gap preflights server resources, replans the untried suffix after retirement, and appends one ordinary restore candidate when it cut healthy media. A relay with a bad ingress reparents itself as a child and retains its subtree. A disconnected endpoint, or one whose effective downstream capacity falls below its current child count, accepts no excess children; its direct or overflow children enter the same operation and a disconnected endpoint is removed when childless. Authoritative pause aborts the operation, suppresses decoded-progress stall decisions, and resumes from a fresh reconciliation.
• One Host publication may serve all SFU subscriptions. Its exact generation owns one ingress handle and exact Viewer subscription handles own egress; later SFU children reuse the publication, while reserved, committed, and draining handles remain charged until the managed room is deleted and proven absent. Actual SFU usage release wakes only rooms that previously lost a candidate to global admission, and SFU-fed and peer-fed endpoints use the same provisional-child transaction. Parent choice hard-filters authority, reachability, cycles, effective capacity, and producer transition, then orders by shallowest result, remaining steady sender capacity, stable join order, and peer identity; server admission is checked at the current cursor. Acyclicity and room admission bound maximum depth; depth is observed but has no separate hard cap. Healthy committed edges remain sticky: the controller repairs waiting, invalid, departed-parent, and overflow children but does not periodically rebalance the graph. Raw IP, claimed NAT type, UA, geography, all-pairs probes, weighted scores, and periodic room rebalancing are not route inputs.
• Ordinary peer ICE is STUN-only, and current LiveKit media is UDP-only. Credentials, room secrets, candidate details, and diagnostic data remain private and narrowly scoped. A future strict-firewall transport requires separate evidence and must remain inside LiveKit rather than becoming another Screener route candidate.
• Browser peers use existing periodic WebRTC/LiveKit stats to maintain one exact-route decoded-progress timestamp. New frames or route/connection changes reset it; a non-paused deadline reports the edge once. Track availability, bitrate, FPS, resolution, freeze, RTT, jitter, loss, sender stats, and SFU layer describe only the current path: they remain framework or diagnostic inputs and cannot prove another parent would be better.
• Browser capture requests available share audio by default on initial capture and source switch, with an explicit video-only warning when no audio track is returned. Its screen-audio control offers live-switchable 64/128/256 kbps sender ceilings and defaults to 128. The last-wins quality wire owns desired state; each endpoint serially applies and reads back current Host/relay/SFU audio senders, exposes local failures, and gives future senders the latest desired value. Opus remains fixed, and without an applied-ack wire the Host does not claim room-wide atomic convergence. These are configuration ceilings, not fidelity claims.
• Browser display video leaves contentHint unset so Chromium retains its screen-capture classification; returned audio tracks keep contentHint = "music". Browser video is fixed to VP8 across direct, browser-relay, and SFU paths; codec selection, fallback to another media codec, quality-state/wire fields, and share-lifetime codec branches are not product features. Actual codec/profile/encoder stats remain diagnostic only. Production still sets video motion and exposes the v10 selector until the implemented v11 contract is deployed atomically.
• Recommended quality remains exactly 1080p60, 1080p30, and 720p30, with the middle 1080p30 as the accepted default. 480p means only an advanced 854x480 resolution choice whose FPS and bitrate remain independently selected; it is not a fourth recommended profile.
• Two distribution artifacts are accepted only after the current feature, NAT, and real-network ledger is complete. A public-server one-click deployment package installs the current application plus STUN/SFU and proxy components on a user-owned server. A Windows/macOS/Linux local package runs the Host, application server, and local state on the broadcaster's machine without source, Node, or any external Screener/network service; it keeps workable direct P2P but reports the reachability loss imposed by public ingress, TLS, gateway, NAT, or firewall limits rather than promising universal connectivity.
• Current UI, presence, route labels, and diagnostics describe observed state only; they do not create route authority.
• Before an explicit public-release decision, the private deployment and repository keep only the current product contract. Incompatible wire, configuration, parser, and API changes ship atomically; stale clients fail before authority, replaced compatibility surfaces are deleted, and Git history owns rollback.
• Viewer presentation remains on the stage until current-generation frame presentation is proven, distinguishes access/Host/queue, peer, SFU, media, autoplay, recovery, and typed failure phases, and keeps Play specific to autoplay rejection. A failed Viewer can export its privacy-safe stage/revision/code even before connection metrics exist; an authenticated Host may request one current route/timing snapshot only when downloading diagnostics. Route decisions, queue timing, and current-path quality are diagnostic only. Browser ICE decides direct reachability; Screener does not predict ports, classify NATs, probe TCP, synthesize remote candidates, or reparent a healthy edge for speculative quality gain.

Current Source And Production

• Exact source implementation f5a295c52e0ac7d18e5a7949217861c7aa74e9c9 uses the single strict screener-v11 Browser wire. Production remains exact integrated main 2726edde9b87f31fd76e749de47972ef817a9bd5, release 2726edd, on screener-v10; auxiliary branches and older worktrees do not supersede canonical main.
• Current source and production admit up to 20 Viewers and implement the uniform 1/2/3 endpoint cap, exact prepare candidate, first-decoded-frame commit, strict rollback revision, decoded-progress stall, a two-stage direct/SFU operation deadline, and one event-driven room controller. A short-lived exact-generation decoded-frame observer proves only the pending candidate inside the existing total deadline; the periodic stats sampler remains responsible for active-path diagnostics and stalls. Ordinary peer ICE is STUN-only and the sole application fallback is SFU/UDP; stale TURN environment keys fail startup. SFU admission uses exact publication and Viewer-subscription handles with explicit no-default ingress/egress capacities and a listener-fenced dedicated LiveKit owner.
• Current source and production use the memory-resident room model: random free four-digit codes, the configurable dormant lease, exact-Host resume, restart loss, local creation-preference replay, orthogonal Viewer grants and open | password | disabled code entry, and direct invitation/policy controls. SQLite room persistence, ROOM_DATABASE_PATH, ROOM_TTL_SECONDS, and a writable room StateDirectory are absent from the current runtime.
• Exact production artifacts, rollback boundary, services, and ports are owned by deployment and indexed by status.
• Current source requires v11, fixes Browser direct, browser-relay, and SFU media to VP8, leaves video contentHint unset, and contains no codec UI, quality state, wire field, fallback media codec, or share-lifetime codec branch. Production remains v10 with the pre-share selector fixed for one share and video contentHint = "motion". Source and production use shareGeneration-fenced Pause/Resume and implement live 64/128/256 kbps audio-ceiling mutation, typed first-frame Viewer presentation, privacy-safe on-demand route diagnostics, neutral room-code denial, responsive entry controls, exactly three recommended profiles with 1080p30 as default and advanced-only 854x480.
• Browser SFU subscribers reconcile eligible Host screen publications across connect/activate event ordering, participant/track arrival, and reconnect. Production LiveKit logs only warn/error, and the application service has a bounded same-host LiveKit readiness preflight.
• Exact v11 source passed the current automated source gates but is not deployed and has no physical direct, browser-relay, or SFU codec evidence. Retained v10 source and production postflight evidence remain bounded to their tested revisions. Exact results are owned by verification status, while artifacts and rollback are owned by deployment.
• Chrome loopback, cap2/cap3, short resource, recovery, MBB, and A/V fixtures are bounded evidence only. They do not establish quality, resource limits, or product policy.

Current Priority

1. Deploy the implemented single-wire Browser v11 contract atomically, then physically validate exact direct, browser-relay, and SFU codec behavior.
2. Queue Browser VP8 hardware-acceleration evidence separately; do not add another codec, custom encoder, or Native helper without a new accepted decision. Diagnose screen audio and invitation UI, then finish background/mobile/network evidence at their stated boundaries; Native/executable, distribution, and repository-wide simplification remain later phases.

Working Rules

• Generic task authority, scope, smallest-correct implementation, and current-result delivery are owned by the repo-tracked stop-that-shit skill; repository-specific truth and execution rules remain in AGENTS.md and CONTRIBUTING.md.
• Old branches may contribute scoped code or evidence only after reconciliation. Their memory, requirements, ADRs, status, and deployment snapshots never overwrite newer mainline truth.
• Preserve dirty, unique, open-stack, and evidence worktrees until their disposition is explicitly decided. Workspace counts are sampled on demand rather than stored here.

Source Map

• Current execution: status
• Executable and held work: TODO ledger
• Requirements and design: requirements, design, and ADRs
• Evidence and limits: research and verification status
• Operations: deployment, maintenance, and contributing