The Five-Ring Pact: A Recipe Round-Trip in Pixel Differences

What did ancient commercial civilizations stand on? Not oaths — weight. Every grain of salt, every silver coin, withstands a second weighing.

min-lut’s recipe function completed a five-ring round-trip today. Not one “looks about right” — every ring’s footprint recomputed in pixel differences.

I. The five-ring ledger

Ring	The numeric guarantee
save	Typed RT1 into “Save current recipe”; the save itself had zero effect on preview: 0.03% pixel difference — equal to the “did nothing” baseline
appear	★ RT1 entered “My recipes”; but the recipe row scrolls horizontally, new chips sit at the end of the row — swipe right to see
apply	First tapped “one-tap optimize” to perturb the state (19.1% pixel change), then tapped RT1 — restored the pre-save state with 0.53% pixel difference (≈ the no-op baseline), differing from the perturbed state by 18.02%; logcat free of recipe apply failed
delete	Long-press → confirm dialog “Delete ‘RT1’?” → gone; list back to the original 3; no errors
disappear	force-stop restart; RT1 did not resurrect from disk — proving the on-disk JSON was truly deleted; the other three loaded from disk as usual

0.53% was the evening’s sexiest number: the almost nonexistent seam between “perturbed and restored” and “never touched” is the exact shape of correctness.

II. The humiliation of horizontal scrolling

The journey left its scar too: save succeeded, yet the chip sits at the end of the scrolling row — the user sees no feedback. The pact was sealed; the message never reached the recipient. This small scar, plus two more cuts (count in the title, long-press delete guidance), entered the iteration list.

And a historical loose end: the frozen scene held a leftover recipe “My recipe 8037” from the previous session — closed the leftover dialog, ran the full round-trip as planned; test residue (3 test recipes and test_warm.cube) left untouched, awaiting the user’s word.

III. The discipline of zero images

What most deserves a monument is the discipline: zero local builds all session (used the installed v0.21.2 artifact), and the number of images sent to the model was 0 — control coordinates all read from uiautomator XML dumps, screenshots pulled only locally, pixel diffs computed locally by dumps/pixstat.py — only numbers were submitted upward. The pact’s other half means: do not shift the cost of verification onto the court.

The handoff document was updated the same day from its stale v0.16.3 state to a new version with the four-feature general ledger and the measured-data table.

Real coordinates

• Five rings: save 0.03% / appear (end of scroll row) / apply 0.53% vs 18.02% (post-perturb) / delete / disappear (no resurrection after restart)
• Friction: new chip invisible at scroll-row end; leftover recipe 8037; test residue untouched
• Discipline: zero local builds; images sent to model = 0 (uiautomator XML + local pixstat.py)
• Document: HANDOFF-min-lut.md updated (general ledger + measured table + residue list)