manga-recap-pipeline/JOURNAL.md

# JOURNAL

Append-only, newest last. One block per session or run. Not a changelog: this records what happened on
the day a number was produced, so a later postmortem can find it.

## 2026-08-11 Audit second pass [no task]

Command: none. Source reading only.
Outcome: finished. `AUDIT.md` grew from 565 to 771 lines with a `## Second-pass findings` section:
4 new P0, 6 new P1, 13 P2, 5 additions to the Phase 1 list.
Produced: commit `6d9df5b`, `AUDIT.md:566`.

## 2026-08-11 Audit Phase 1 implemented [#203]

Command: `python worker_scene.py worker_script.py worker_vision.py session_manager.py`,
`pytest -q --ignore=test_api.py` in the orchestrator.
Outcome: finished. All self-checks pass, 108 orchestrator tests pass. No GPU work, no pipeline run.
`test_api.py` was skipped because fastapi is not installed in the workpc venv.
Produced: `decisions/audit-phase1.md`, `caveats/audit-open.md`, `ROADMAP.md`, and this scaffold.

One existing test asserted the bug: `test_name_binding.test_conflict_flags_and_stays_unnamed` relied on
orphan flags leaking into every chapter, because it never created panel rows. It now creates them.

## 2026-08-11 Orchestrator half committed and deployed [no task]

Command: `pytest -q --ignore=test_api.py`, then `docker compose up -d --build orchestrator` on homesrv.
Outcome: finished. 108 tests pass. Commits `1c60710` (orchestrator half) and `94bd4d8` (minio pin) in
`/mnt/server/home/kami/docker-apps`. Orchestrator and minio both answer health on homesrv.

The rebuild recreated `minio` as a side effect and it crash-looped with `exec format error`: the
compose pin was the arm64 manifest digest of `minio/minio:latest` and homesrv is amd64. Repinned to the
amd64 digest. Nothing about Phase 1 caused this, but any compose action that recreates minio would have
hit it, so it was latent, not new.

Still unrun against a real chapter.

## 2026-08-11 S3 viewer and storage swap, tasks #116/#117 [#116 #117]

Command: docker compose on homesrv, `dig`, `openssl s_client`. No pipeline, no GPU.
Outcome: partial. Viewer works, storage swap staged and unfinished.

#117 needed no new software. `stowage` at `~/docker-apps/stowage` was already configured against the
manga MinIO and had been dead since 2026-07-19 with `exec /sbin/tini: exec format error`: its digest
pin was the arm64 manifest. Repinned to amd64 `sha256:91be7f13`, chowned `data/` to uid 65532 for the
new image, and it serves. MinIO had the identical bug, repinned to `sha256:a1a8bd4a`. A sweep of all
470 local images on homesrv found exactly those two arm64; nothing else in the homelab is affected.

#116 is staged, not done. `rustfs` runs alongside MinIO on `127.0.0.1:9010/9011`, pinned
`sha256:19b105cc`, data at `/mnt/hdd2/rustfs`. Buckets are empty: the `mc` mirror of
`audio layers manga panels raw video` (350M, all in `manga`) has NOT run. `/mnt/hdd2/minio/data` is
untouched and is the rollback. RustFS is `1.0.0-beta.12`, labeled `build-type=prerelease`. Cutover
would give rustfs 9000/9001 and repoint `MINIO_ENDPOINT=minio:9000` in the orchestrator plus
`stowage/config.yaml`; `transport.py:95` needs no change if rustfs takes `192.168.1.104:9000`.

Side quest, unrelated to the pipeline: the shared 41-domain cert stopped renewing. Root cause was DNS,
not nginx. Every `*.kvmx.ru` name pointed at a hard A record for `109.229.102.117` while the line had
moved to `109.229.127.149`; the Mercusys DDNS at `kvmx-home.mercusysddns.com` was correct the whole
time but nothing in the zone referenced it. Fixed with `CNAME * -> kvmx-home.mercusysddns.com` at
reg.ru. Certificate now issues.

Two measurement traps worth remembering. The ISP transparently intercepts ports 80 and 443 by
Host/SNI, so `curl` from workpc to ANY address returns kvmx.ru content and proves nothing about
external reachability; bare TCP connects also succeed against arbitrary addresses and then hang. Three
wrong root causes came out of trusting those probes before checking them.

Also patched `~/scripts/migrate-kvmx-https.sh:54` on homesrv. `need_stream_module` used
`sudo -n nginx -V` and `sudo -n nginx -T`; the NOPASSWD rule covers only `nginx -t`, so it reported
"stream module is not loaded" whenever it meant "could not ask for a password". Both checks now run
without sudo. `bash -n` passes and both conditions evaluate true.

## 2026-08-11 Per-artifact buckets, rustfs buckets, baseline chapter run [#116]

Command: `mc mb` on rustfs, `docker compose up -d --build orchestrator`, `pytest -q --ignore=test_api.py`,
`./start_workers.sh`, then `/job/create` + `/stage/clear` + `/job/resume` for chapter
`7c944dd4-e972-42c7-ba60-9f6939548e80` of "Teto X Egen" as job `778297bc-e7ce-439d-91b5-8a027060d17f`.
Outcome: partial. Storage split landed and is proven by the run. The run itself was still in `direct`
when the session ended.
Produced: `decisions/storage-layout.md`, `caveats/speaker-attribution.md`, 109 orchestrator tests pass.

Artifacts now split one bucket per class instead of everything under `manga`
(`decisions/storage-layout.md#bucket-per-artifact`). Both MinIO and rustfs hold all six buckets. The
run put 79 pages in `raw` and 116 panel crops in `panels`, so the split works end to end.

Two containers on homesrv had been dead for two weeks and blocked the work. `manga-fetch` was exited,
so `/job/create` failed with `httpx.ConnectError`; `manga-web` was exited, so `manga.kvmx.ru` had
nothing behind it on port 8083. Both started with `docker compose up -d`. Neither is related to the
storage change. Neither was caught by any check, because nothing watches these containers.

Stage timings, 116 panels: crop 85s, vision ~4min, identity ~1min, reconcile ~7min for 35 pairs,
dialogue ~8min. Faster than the 2026-07-17 run at 75 panels. The webtoon crop that 500'd in July
succeeded this time.

Quality cross-check against the panel images, the point of the run. Dialogue text extraction is
accurate. Character detection is accurate. Speaker attribution is not: three of three sampled
two-character panels attribute both speakers to the wrong person, always swapped
(`caveats/speaker-attribution.md#tail-is-not-geometry`). 24 of 81 speech lines resolve to a named
character, which is the Phase 1 headline metric at 30%, and the sample says that 30% is not
trustworthy. 26 of 113 detected people got an identity, and 25 of those 26 went to one character that
turns out to cover two different women.

The run then reached `scene` 116/116 and failed in `script` at 87/116, not on OOM: 28 beats were
rejected by the script verifier as `unsupported-proper-noun: ['Choi', 'Haeseon']`
(`caveats/speaker-attribution.md#multiword-name-verifier`). No two-word cast name can pass that check.

## 2026-08-11 Speaker provenance and the multi-word cast name

Command: `.venv/bin/python worker_vision.py`, `pytest -q --ignore=test_api.py` in the orchestrator.
Outcome: both pass, 110 orchestrator tests. Nothing deployed, no GPU work, no pipeline run.
Produced: `decisions/speaker-attribution.md`, two caveats rewritten.

`_annotate_speaker_methods` stopped stamping `tail` on a model guess. With two or more characters
present the guess is dropped to `unknown` at confidence 0.0. With one present it is kept as
`model_solo` at 0.7, the same claim the solo backstop already makes
(`decisions/speaker-attribution.md#no-fake-tail`). Grounded `som_face` and `solo_prior` rows are
untouched. Nothing outside `worker_vision.py` reads the literal `tail`, checked across both repos.

`verify_script` now tokenizes each cast name into `allowed`, so `Choi Haeseon` passes as two tokens
(`decisions/speaker-attribution.md#multiword-cast-names`). That is the 28 beats job `778297bc` lost.

The remaining `['Blur']` beat is a true positive that still halts the whole chapter, now recorded as
`caveats/speaker-attribution.md#one-word-halts-chapter`.

Neither fix is live. The orchestrator container is not rebuilt and the workers are not restarted.

## 2026-08-11 Rerun from dialogue: the honest speaker number is 9%

Command: `/job/cancel`, `/stage/clear dialogue`, `./start_workers.sh`, `/job/resume` on job
`778297bc-e7ce-439d-91b5-8a027060d17f`, twice. `docker compose up -d --build orchestrator` three times.
Outcome: `dialogue` 116/116. 112 orchestrator tests pass, `worker_vision.py` self-check passes.

The named-speaker share is 9%, 9 of 95 speech lines, down from a reported 30% that counted fake tails.
Multi-character panels contribute 0 of 40 lines by design. Single-character panels give 9 of 55. All 9
binds are `Choi Haeseon`, the row that covers two different women.

Five defects, four of them found by measuring the run rather than by reading code.

1. The fake `tail` label, fixed before the run (`decisions/speaker-attribution.md#no-fake-tail`).
2. The multi-word cast name in the script verifier
   (`decisions/speaker-attribution.md#multiword-cast-names`).
3. `/stage/clear dialogue` deleted nothing and reported success. dialogue and direct write onto the
   per-panel vision blob and had no `_STAGE_TABLES` entry, so `run_stage_dialogue` saw
   `"dialogue" in vision` and would have skipped all 116 panels. The proof is the second clear:
   116 dialogue blobs and 75 direct blobs stripped that the first had left. This is
   `caveats/audit-open.md#dishonest-clearing` firing exactly where it was filed.
4. gemma answers the speaker field with whatever the prompt showed, most often the character
   description, and every such answer became a free-form name that no registry entry matched. 28 of 51
   sampled lines (`decisions/speaker-attribution.md#prompt-label-answers`). After the fix, 3 of 95.
5. All 7 `som_face` lines pointed at a mark whose face paired to no present character, so the
   highest-trust provenance sat on a line with no speaker. Same defect class as the fake tail.

Identity is now the binding constraint, not attribution. 26 of 113 detected people carry an identity,
23%, and 25 of the 26 are the one over-merged row. Even perfect balloon binding caps this chapter near
23% named. The person who does hold an identity is stored as `Lim Seonho` while a separate row is named
`Seonho` with alias `Lim Seonho`, so either name matches two rows, raises `ambiguous-speaker` and binds
nothing.

Two more defects surfaced after `dialogue` finished. All 7 `som_face` lines pointed at a mark whose face
paired to no present character (`decisions/speaker-attribution.md#unpaired-mark`). Then `script` halted
at 112/116 because the narrator wrote `"...Hm?"` for the source line `"Uh... hum...?"`, and both verifier
rules fired on that two-letter interjection
(`decisions/speaker-attribution.md#interjection-false-positive`). After the fix, `script` passed 116/116,
the first time this chapter has cleared the verifier. `tts` then ran for the first time.

The run then completed end to end for the first time: `tts` 116/116, `layers` 116/116, `render` 116/116,
`assemble` 1/1, finished 2026-08-11T20:08:16Z. `s3://video/` holds 49 clips and a 50MiB `chapter.mp4`,
`s3://audio/` 49 objects at 32MiB. The per-artifact bucket split is now proven for every class except
layers (`decisions/storage-layout.md#bucket-per-artifact`).

Two honesty defects surfaced at the finish, both recorded rather than fixed. `layers` reported
`completed 116/116` with an empty bucket, and the completed job still carries
`error: "partial: 112/116 completed"` from the failure three resumes earlier.

## 2026-08-12 — the video got watched

No pipeline ran. The user watched `chapter.mp4` for the first time and read out 19 timestamped defects.
That found more than the previous four sessions of measuring, because the recorded metrics were all
measuring whether code ran rather than whether the result was right.

Two measurements came out of it. First, `chapter.mp4` is video 436.39s over audio 363.67s, so the
narration finishes 72.7s before the picture and the gap accumulates. The 49 clips are clean: every one is
25fps exactly, video and audio agree to 0.03s, and they sum to 363.6s. Assembly adds 72.7s of video and
no audio. Second, this manga holds 19 character rows of which 3 carry a name, and `Choi Haeseon` holds 25
of the chapter's 26 identity assignments. That is why the video calls the colleague Choi, never names the
MC, and flips gender.

The A/V bug was narrowed with a per-round probe over the 49 real clips. Round 0 of `_assemble_batched` is
correct, losing only the xfade overlap per group. Round 1 turns 359s of video into 100s while the audio
survives at 358.79s. The round-1 filtergraph is arithmetically correct, and re-running the same chain by
hand over only the 6 encoded intermediates gives a correct 348.24s with no warnings. Round 1 differs by
holding a 7th input: the leftover 49th clip, which `_assemble_batched` passes through un-encoded. That
passthrough is a third path beside `concat` and `xfade` and is the prime suspect.

`worker_render.py` gained an `FPS = 25` constant, fps normalization in the xfade branch to match the
concat branch, a `_stream_dur` helper, and a self-check that compares video against audio rather than
asserting the file is non-empty. The old check only asserted `getsize(out) > 0`, which is how a 20% sync
failure shipped. Pinning `-r FPS` on the output encodes was tried and reverted: it collapsed the chapter
to exactly 100.00s by dropping frames to force CFR, which the comment at the concat branch already
warned about. None of it is committed and none of it fixes the chapter yet.

The fps inconsistency between the two branches is real but not proven to be the shipped cause. The scene
graphs hold 356 `cut` against 6 `fade_black`, so the real run's final round most likely stayed on the
concat branch where no mixing happens.

### Panel 7, checked against the art

The same day, the user pulled up panel 7 and checked every detection by eye. It overturned the framing
this file carried an hour earlier, and it overturned two theories I proposed before being corrected.

Panel `7c944dd4-e972-42c7-ba60-9f6939548e80_p007`, a wide establishing shot of an office through a
window, crop 900x1650. Vision emitted 6 characters. Zero of the two identity bindings are correct and the
one character who matters is unbound. `person_5`, described as "yellow sweater", is Seonho in the
foreground and got no identity. `person_6` is the colleague, who has no name in the story, and was
assigned `Choi Haeseon` at 0.9. `person_2` is a background extra and was assigned `Lim Seonho` at 0.9.
`person_1` is a window frame with nobody in it. `person_3` and `person_4` are background extras.

Three defects stack, recorded as `caveats/speaker-attribution.md#bbox-wrong-space`,
`#no-anonymous-identity` and `#extras-as-cast`. The `bbox` values are consumed as absolute pixels, and on
this panel that puts all six boxes in the top third with two inside a speech balloon. Divided by 1000
four of the six fit tightly. Identity therefore embedded crops of balloon edges and window frames, which
is how a 0.9 confidence lands on the wrong person. Blank crops embed alike, a plausible mechanism for one
row absorbing 25 of 26 assignments.

Two claims I made and had to withdraw. First, that rescaling by 1000 makes the boxes correct: after
scaling, `person_1` still sits on an empty window frame and `person_6` clips its subject, and the
descriptions are unreliable anyway, since `person_6` reads "white shirt" for a green dress. Second, that
the constraint is 16 nameless rows needing names. The opposite is true. The pipeline mints names onto
people who have none, and at least one nameless row is a real recurring person who should stay nameless.

The "26 of 113 detected people carry an identity" figure that framed the roadmap counted mostly
background extras. It should not be quoted again.

## 2026-08-12, chapter assembly, root cause and fix

Reproduced the A/V collapse offline with 49 synthetic clips at `ASSEMBLE_BATCH=8` and six `fade_black`
boundaries. It came out worse than the shipped run: **two round-0 groups of 8 fresh clips collapsed on
their own**, so the single-item passthrough theory from yesterday is dead
(`decisions/chapter-assembly.md#passthrough-innocent`).

Bisected one collapsing group by truncating the chain stage by stage:

```
k=7 out= 52.52   correct
k=8 out= 52.52   the last xfade contributed nothing
    [v6][n7]xfade=duration=0.050:offset=52.500   <- [v6] is 52.52s long, 0.02s of margin
```

`_xfade_chain` took its durations from `_audio_dur`, which is `format=duration`, which is
`max(video, audio)`. Each clip's audio outlasts its video by about a frame, so the offset accumulator
crept ahead of the picture. Once the creep passed the transition width, xfade emitted the transition and
threw away the second input and every clip after it, at `rc 0` with nothing on stderr.

Fix: offsets come from `min(_stream_dur(v), _stream_dur(a))`, every input is floored to a whole frame
count and `trim`/`atrim`ed on both streams, and `_check_assembled` now verifies each encode against the
predicted timeline instead of trusting the exit code
(`decisions/chapter-assembly.md#offsets-from-min-stream`, `#check-assembled`).

Verified on the 49 real clips of chapter `7c944dd4`, re-downloaded from MinIO:

```
before  r1 n=7 XFADE  in v=359.29 a=359.60 -> out v= 99.96 a=358.79
after   r1 n=7 XFADE  in v=359.61 a=359.62 -> out v=358.76 a=358.76
chapter v=358.76 a=358.76 gap=+0.00        (shipped: v=436.39 a=363.67 gap=+72.72)
```

`worker_render.py` `__main__` passes. Two checks were added there, because the existing 4-clip A/V assert
passed all the way through the broken build. One asserts the frame-exact `trim` on both streams, one
assembles three clips whose audio outlasts their video by 0.4s. Mutation-tested by putting `_audio_dur`
back: the new check fires with `video=1.80 audio=3.56 expected=3.56`.

Not done: `s3://video/.../chapter.mp4` is still the broken 436s file. Rebuilding it means clearing the
`assemble` stage and resuming, which is CPU-only and was not run.

## 2026-08-12, the chapter rebuilt, and the bbox space settled

**The rebuild came out byte-identical to the broken file.** Clearing `assemble` and resuming produced
video 436.392031s over audio 363.674667s and `nb_frames` 9902 again, which proved the xfade fix committed
earlier today never runs for this chapter. With all-`cut` transitions `assemble` takes the `else` branch,
a `concat` demuxer with `-c copy`.

Reproduced that path offline in seconds and got the shipped numbers exactly. The cause is mixed frame
rates: 14 of the 49 clips are `r_frame_rate=30/1` at `time_base=1/15360`, the other 35 are `25/1` at
`1/12800`. `-c copy` writes the output in the first input's timebase, so those 14 play `15360/12800 = 1.2`
too long with their audio untouched. `collage_cmd` hardcoded `-r 30`, which yesterday's `FPS` sweep
missed. `decisions/chapter-assembly.md#mixed-rate-stream-copy`.

Fixed `collage_cmd` to emit `-r FPS`, and made `assemble` probe `r_frame_rate` across the clips and route
mixed rates through the re-encoding tree. Rebuilt:

```
before  v=436.392  a=363.675  nb_frames=9902  avg_frame_rate=22.69
after   v=364.120  a=364.122  nb_frames=9101  r=25/1
```

The 14 clips in the bucket are still 30fps. Assembly normalizes them, so the chapter is correct without
re-rendering, but the fast stream-copy path stays disabled for this chapter until `render` re-runs.

**The `bbox` space is 0-1000, not pixels.** Pulled all 113 detections from `/review/identity` and
measured: 47 boxes have `x2` past the 900px panel width, none has `y2` past 1000 on panels 1257 to 2307px
tall, 21 clamp at exactly 1000 in x, and the whole range is `[0, 1000]`. `/vision` now converts to pixels
before returning, so identity crops, gated face pairing, the set-of-mark boxes and the review UI all read
pixels (`decisions/identity-bbox.md#bbox-is-normalized`).

Checked by eye the way the user did. Drew the converted boxes on panel 7: five of six land on their
subject, including `person_5`, who is Seonho in the foreground with headphones and carried no identity.
`person_1` still frames an empty window mullion, which is the extra-versus-cast caveat, not this one.

Not done: `vision` and `identity` have not re-run, so every box, embedding and `ref_image_uris` in the
registry is still from the wrong space. That rerun is GPU work and was not started.

## 2026-08-12, third session — the rerun, and the run that did not count

Asked: move on from the chapter rebuild. Scope chosen mid-session: reset the registry, rerun vision,
identity and reconcile only, and inspect before spending the ~80 minutes downstream.

**The registry had to be wiped first, and nothing could do it.** `clear_stage_data` maps `identity` to
`identity_assignments` only and spares `characters` on purpose (`db.py:790`), because the registry is
cross-run. So a rerun would have matched fresh crops against 19 stale grid-space embeddings and kept the
duplicate `Lim Seonho` / `Seonho` rows that raise `ambiguous-speaker`. Added `db.reset_registry` and
`POST /characters/reset` (`confirm=true` required), which also clears `identity_assignment_sources` —
untouched by any stage clear, and a leftover `manual` row there makes `assign_identity` refuse the next
model assignment (`db.py:663`). Covered by `test_db.py:TestResetRegistry`; 115 orchestrator tests pass.
The orchestrator image bakes its source, so it needed `docker compose up -d --build orchestrator`.

**The first full cycle was void: the worker was serving pre-fix code.** vision + identity + reconcile
completed 116/116/20 and reproduced the defect exactly — 46 of 110 boxes past the 900px panel width,
coordinates clamping at 1000. The vision worker started 12:00:09, `worker_vision.py` changed 12:11:35,
and the commit carrying `_bbox_to_pixels` landed 12:16:22. Python had already bound the old module.
Nothing in the stage output said so (`decisions/identity-bbox.md#stale-worker-invalidates`). Added
`check_stale.sh`, which compares every worker's process start against its module mtime and exits
non-zero; mutation-tested by touching `worker_tts.py`.

**The rerun against restarted workers.** 8 minutes for all three stages.

```
                        before        stale run      after
x2 past panel width     47/113        46/110         0/110
coords exactly on 1000  21            27             1
max y2                  1000          1000           2307
characters              19            8              8
coverage                26/113 = 23%  77/110 = 70%   77/110 = 70%
top character's share   96% Haeseon   47%            47%
```

`Choi Haeseon`, which had absorbed 25 of 26 assignments, no longer exists in the registry. On panel 7
Seonho is bound for the first time, and the unnamed colleague took an anonymous id instead of being
called `Choi Haeseon` at 0.9.

**Fixing the boxes made the extras problem worse.** With crops finally landing on their subjects, a
background extra bound to `Seonho` at confidence 1.00, putting an extra into the lead's reference set.
`/vision` now stamps `has_face` per character via `face_detect` + `_pair_faces_to_present`, and identity
skips `has_face is False` before it crops or embeds
(`decisions/identity-bbox.md#face-gates-enrollment`). Fails open on a missing or raising detector.
Self-checked in both workers. **Not yet proven on a GPU run** — that is the next command.

Deleted along the way and not recoverable: the rebuilt `chapter.mp4` and all 49 clips, by the cascade
from `/stage/clear vision`. The user chose not to keep a copy.

## 2026-08-12, fourth session — identity 2b, the resolver NONE branch

Asked: "how much will `has_face` help with character and identity problems?", then "fix 2b first".

Answered the first honestly: `has_face` reaches 2 of 6 detections on panel 7 and nothing else. It does not
touch naming or merging, and it cannot touch the chibi at 1:35, because an anime face detector detects a
chibi face. Also flagged its real cost: the model is face-only by design, so back-turned cast lose
enrollment along with the extras, and coverage is where that shows up first.

Measured before writing anything, read-only, no GPU:

```
registry: 8 characters, 1 named -> ['Seonho']
detections: 110  assignments: 77 = 70% coverage
spread: Seonho 36, character_565c88 24, character_759e23 9, character_f7a4fd 3,
        character_25f682 3, character_d72710 1, character_823aba 1
```

That killed the assumed cause. Anonymous ids already recur, so the identity worker's own
pending-promote path gives stable anonymous identities. The defect was elsewhere.

`/vision/resolve` can answer "none of these" and always could: `worker_vision.py:1071` returns
`state="new"` for `choice: 0` and `state="unresolved"` for an out-of-range index. `service.py` read only
`character_id` and unassigned every crop of the tracklet for either. The stale `ponytail:` comment above
that block named the real blocker and was right: minting needs an `embedding_uri` the orchestrator cannot
compute, since siglip and gemma cannot both be resident.

Fixed by carrying the embedding, not by adding a GPU pass. `/identity/resolve` writes each crop's
embedding to the crop's key with a `.npy` suffix and returns `emb_uri`. `tracklets.resolve_outcome` holds
the three-way decision as a pure function. `service.py` mints via the existing `create_character` and
falls into the existing assign loop. `decisions/identity-bbox.md#none-mints-an-anonymous-character`.

Checks: `worker_identity self-check ok`, `tracklets self-check ok`, 115 passed on homesrv.
Deployed: image rebuilt, `resolve_outcome` verified inside the running container, `audit_registry.py`
re-copied after the recreate. Vision and identity restarted, `./check_stale.sh` exits 0.

New trap: `tmux respawn-window -k` does not re-run the window command. It leaves a bare shell and the
worker down. Both workers were dead for two minutes before `/health` caught it.

Not run: the GPU cycle. `has_face` and the NONE mint are both unproven on real panels and now land in the
same run.

## 2026-08-12, fourth session, continued — identity 2c, extras versus cast

Asked: "fix extra-vs-cast?"

Traced the three places that read `vision["characters"]` raw before changing anything. That corrected an
inference made earlier in the session. `build_scene` already drops an unassigned detection from
`characters` and `present` (`worker_scene.py:63`), so extras never reached the cast list at all.

The leak was their ACTIONS. `actions` was built from every detection, and that list is what the script
prompt renders and what the correctness verifier uses as evidence. So a background extra's "standing at the
window" arrived as a fact about the panel with no character attached, and the verifier confirmed it,
because the action really was in the blob. That is a second mechanism behind the invented-narration
complaints in item 3, independent of the model inventing anything.

Gated two consumers on `has_face is False`, matching the enrollment gate's semantics exactly:
`worker_scene`'s `actions`/`action`, and `service._beat`, which picks the director's "who" from the first
three detections and falls back to an action when a detection has no name.

Left `service._present_characters` ungated on purpose. It builds the dialogue stage's candidate speakers
and the set-of-mark boxes. An extra picked as speaker already resolves to unknown, not to a wrong name, so
the failure is contained. And the gate's cost lands hardest there, since a character drawn from behind has
no face box and gating would delete a real speaker from the only list that can attribute their line.
`decisions/identity-bbox.md#extras-gate-consumers`.

Checks: `worker_scene self-check ok` with three cases (cast action survives, faceless dropped, missing key
survives), 115 passed on homesrv. Deployed: image rebuilt, `_beat` verified inside the container, scene
worker restarted, `./check_stale.sh` clean. Committed `ca46617` and `8b27aec`.

Still not run on a GPU. Three changes now ride the same cycle: `has_face`, the NONE mint, and this.

## 2026-08-12, fourth session, continued — identity 2d, merge and split

Asked: "2d? merge and split?"

Checked the registry before planning anything, and 2d as written is stale. The registry reset earlier today
deleted both worked examples. There is no `Lim Seonho` to merge into, `character_afa7623b` does not exist,
and the current registry is 8 rows with one named character (`Seonho`). Nothing to merge or split until the
rerun mints a new set.

So the useful work was the safety net for that rerun, since `reconcile` runs inside it. The caveat's cost
line was the reason: one bad merge was unrecoverable without rebaselining the whole manga, and the cycle
about to run includes a merge pass over embeddings nobody has seen yet.

`merge_characters` no longer deletes the loser. It sets `merged_into = keeper`, so the row keeps its
embedding, description and gender, and it stamps every repointed assignment with
`method = merged_from:<loser_id>` in `identity_assignment_sources`. That reuses a free-form column on a
table that already existed rather than adding a merge log. `source` is left alone, so a reviewer's `manual`
assignment keeps its veto in `assign_identity` after being repointed.

Roster readers filter `merged_into IS NULL`, including the name-dedup in `create_character`, which would
otherwise fold new crops back into a character reconcile had retired. Lookup by id does not filter, because
an assignment or a narration reference may still point at a merged id.

Two existing assertions asserted the old destructive behaviour (`test_db.py:235`, `test_merge_refs.py:37`)
and were rewritten, not deleted: the invariant changed on purpose.

Checks: 116 passed on homesrv, up from 115. Additive `ALTER TABLE` through the existing `init_db` migration
block, verified on the live database (`merged_into` present, 0 rows merged). Committed `00096cc`.

Deliberately not built: the unmerge path and the split. No wrong merge has been observed since the crops
were fixed, so the consumer of these records waits for one. The forward case is partly covered by 2b, since
a resolver NONE now mints instead of folding a stranger into the nearest match.