Closes the remaining bake-off cells. The phase's real result was not a route
score but a MISSING GATE.
All twelve SDXL icons measured 100% opaque coverage -- square tiles with no
sprite silhouette -- and passed every gate in the harness. Gate-pass was
measuring pipeline hygiene, not usability. MARGIN_TOO_SMALL inverts the table
from a meaningless 12/12/12 tie to:
diffusion 0/12 (every output full-bleed)
vector 10/12
procedural 11/12
The two non-diffusion failures were true positives in MY shapes, not gate
error: the procedural sword pommel ran off the bottom edge and the vector meat
bone clipped the top. Both fixed; both routes back to 12/12.
Diffusion recovers to 12/12 with flood-fill background removal, but visual
inspection shows the fill eats into the art (bone reduced to a fragment, sword
nearly erased). Reported as inadequate rather than shipped -- proper matting is
needed before route (b) is a usable pipeline.
Blender exits 0 even when its embedded script raises: BLENDER_EEVEE_NEXT does
not exist in 5.2, and the failure produced a clean exit and no file. render()
now asserts the output exists, or the route would report phantom successes.
Model gating verified at execution time, never recalled: SDXL base and
nerijs/pixel-art-xl are ungated, FLUX.1-dev is gated=auto, and
runwayml/stable-diffusion-v1-5 now 307-redirects.
The finishing stage now generalises across three continuous-tone sources
(SVG raster, Blender render, SDXL): each is 0/N raw and N/N finished.
Verified: 114 tests, 100% branch coverage on 13 modules, zero suppressions,
all hooks pass. Note: a local pytest run masked a missing branch that the
pre-commit hook caught -- the hook's run is authoritative.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01T9rQ12yZ7sJxiPQTCS5dUF
Closes the two CPU-only cells of the art bake-off and builds the bridge the
diffusion cell will reuse.
Pins the bake-off to the SAME twelve subjects item-icons measured, with its
easy/hard split intact. Without this a route tested on distinctive silhouettes
beats the 6/12 baseline for free and the decision table means nothing. It also
makes the subject-routing rule falsifiable: a generator route is predicted to
lift specifically the six human-prior failures, and if it does not, the rule is
recorded as wrong.
Route (a) procedural: all twelve subjects drawn deterministically from a
7-colour locked palette. Every shape gets a distinguishing feature up front,
because item-icons measured that plain primitives read as placeholders however
correct the geometry is. Machine gate: 12/12 -- which proves "not malformed",
NOT quality. A procedural generator satisfies palette/alpha/canvas constraints
trivially; the human contact sheet is the real verdict.
Route (d) code-as-art: SVG emitted as text and rasterised by rsvg-convert, so
no new Python dependency (cairosvg/svgwrite stay absent).
The structural finding, measured on real rasteriser output rather than a
synthetic stand-in: raw vector renders pass 0/5 -- every one fails
ALPHA_NOT_BINARY, most also TOO_MANY_COLORS. After the finishing stage, 5/5.
Continuous-tone routes are therefore GENERATORS FEEDING A FINISHER, not
pixel-art generators. finish.py binarises alpha before quantising colour,
mirroring the gate order: quantising first blends transparent pixels' arbitrary
RGB into the palette.
Verified: 92 tests, 100% branch coverage across all ten modules, zero
suppressions, all hooks pass. The PLR2004 lint refactor was confirmed
pixel-neutral by byte-comparing all 12 icons before and after (12/12 identical).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01T9rQ12yZ7sJxiPQTCS5dUF
