Augment It
Search/

← Context/ issues

0.0.1.0Resolved

Domain type is ambient state, so a failed workspace load hides every corpus

humain-vc opened the Corpora Curator and saw 'strategy' and 'No corpora yet' — it has theses, and plenty of them. One guessed value at load time silently filtered the whole surface, and the same symptom was debugged out once already on 2026-07-07.

Why Care?

An operator on humain-vc opened the Corpora Curator and was told they had no corpora. They have theses. The surface had guessed strategy for the domain type, queried domain.list with it, got nothing back, and rendered "No corpora yet" — a sentence indistinguishable from the truth.

This exact symptom was fixed once already, on 2026-07-07 (618ec0d). That fix repaired the switching path — the curator now tracks whichever workspace is actually active. It left the guess in place. So the symptom came back the first time workspace.list was slow, and it will keep coming back, because the underlying design still requires the client to know a value it may not have yet.

What was observed

Header chip read humain-vc / strategy, connection open, body "No corpora yet." The tell is that humain-vc rendered as a pill, not a <select>:

SVELTE
{#if curation.workspaces.length}   <select class="cc-ws">          ← normal
{:else if connection !== 'open'}   <span>connecting…</span>
{:else}                            <span class="cc-pill">{clientSlug}</span>  ← observed

A pill plus open means curation.workspaces was empty — the workspace list never arrived, while the socket was healthy. workspace.list timed out after 120s was in the console.

Root cause

domainType was global ambient state standing in for a property of the selected corpus. It was threaded into ~15 calls — domain.list, domain.assemble, every source.*, tag.apply — so one wrong value at load time poisoned everything downstream.

Its only source could fail open:

TS
private defaultDomainTypeFor(client_id: string): string {
  return workspace.workspaces.find((w) => w.client_id === client_id)?.default_domain_type
    ?? DEFAULT_DOMAIN_TYPE;   // 'strategy'
}

Empty list → 'strategy' → domain.list { type: 'strategy' } against a thesis-only workspace → zero rows → "No corpora yet."

Not a backend defect. clients/humain-vc/.env carries DEFAULT_DOMAIN_TYPE=thesis, the container reads it, and services/workspace/src/workspaces.ts:268 maps it correctly.

Not caused by the corpora-curator rename. curation.svelte.ts had zero non-comment changes in that refactor; CorpusPicker.svelte had only class renames. See Rename Strategy Curator To Corpora Curator.

The deeper problem — the filter was never wanted

Domains were abstracted precisely so that any type shows up. The types have no behavioural difference today; they are vocabulary preference — reach-edu says "strategy," humain-vc says "thesis." The resolver already treats the filter as optional:

TS
export async function listDomains(db, args: { type?: string; client_slug?: string })

type is optional and is projected in the result set. The client was imposing a narrowing the backend never asked for, and paying for it with an entire class of bug.

The fix

  1. Stop filtering the list. domain.list is called with client_slug only. Every corpus in the workspace appears regardless of type, and each row shows its type as a chip so a thesis and a strategy are distinguishable.

  2. The type follows the selected corpus. domain.assemble, every source.*, and tag.apply read active.type — a property of the thing the operator clicked — instead of an ambient mode.

  3. domainType demotes to the create-form default, i.e. "what this client calls things." A wrong value can now only mis-prefill one visible text field the operator can see and change; it can no longer hide anything.

  4. ACTIVE_STRATEGY_KEY keys on type:slug. Uniqueness is (type, slug) — "apprenticeship" can be a strategy and a topic — so a bare slug would restore the wrong corpus once a workspace holds both.

  5. The broadcast filter drops its type check. Any domain change in this client is now relevant, because the list is no longer type-scoped.

No backend change.

What this closes for good

The failure mode required a guessed global type. There is no longer a guessed global type, so "workspace list is slow" degrades to "the create form's Type field is pre-filled with the wrong word" — visible, local, and correctable — rather than "you have no corpora."