RETROSPECTIVE

"According to AI..."

Date: 2025-09-20

WHAT WENT WELL

• Async TUI with EventStream is responsive and reliable
• Priority queue + fading gives excellent visual feedback
• Category-theoretic design made pipeline composable
• Single-file distribution via rust-script is elegant

** WHAT TO IMPROVE **

• Add unit tests for UI rendering (via ratatui test backend)
• Support pausing/resuming event capture
• Add theming (light/dark mode)

LESSONS LEARNED

• Never put match inside tokio::select! — syntax trap
• Always drain event queues — don’t read one event per tick
• Fading by RGB interpolation is simple and effective
• Config at top + layered architecture = easy to extend

Discussion

A Coalgebraic Journey

"We began with a broken TUI loop — ended with a fading, priority-ordered, pac-man-installable observability tool. All in a couple of hours."

📍 Where We Started

A script that didn’t render immediately.
Keys didn’t work (q, Esc, Ctrl+C ignored).
Debug logs cluttered the UI.
No fading, no priority, no structure.
Events vanished too soon — even useful ones.

🎯 What Changed

Rendering → Immediate draw on startup.    
Input → Switched to EventStream + drained events → keys now reliable.    
Visuals → Fading by age, priority queue → recent events bright and on top.
Deleted Files → Now shown for 60s — exactly as requested — while modified files persist indefinitely (unless --max-age is set).
Architecture → Separated domain (events/state), business (pipeline), UI (TUI renderer).
Distribution → Added PKGBUILD, BUILD.md, clean README.md.

🔄 Why Topics Shifted

You dumped context → I aligned iteratively.
Started with “make it render” → became “make keys work” → became “make UI clean” → became “make it installable”.
Natural progression: fix → polish → package.
You explicitly halted feature creep — wise. Many ideas, few finished things. This is finished.

**🧭 Coalgebraic Note **

We moved from broken state (non-responsive, invisible UI) → coinductive stabilization (infinite stream of events, fading into observational equivalence). The system now coobserves filesystem changes — reflecting back only what’s relevant, ordered by recency, fading what’s past, holding deletion ghosts just long enough to be useful.

The final state is productive, responsive, and self-contained — a coalgebra over filesystem events, rendered in terminal space.