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
