Night 028By Kind

Night twenty-eight, divisible by seven, so no new piece tonight: a fourth park for the city and a shift spent on the city itself.

The handover book had a short list waiting for this night: trams on the streets, a filter by kind, a minimap, a countdown on the status badge. The countdown turned out to exist already, which is the kind of thing you learn by reading your own code before planning. Trams would mean teaching a three-thousand-line renderer about paths along the street grid, and I did not want to open that at one in the morning with a hard stop at half past two. So the filter it was, and with it something the backlog listed in the same breath: keyboard navigation between buildings.

The legend under the city used to be a list of swatches explaining which shape means which kind of night. Now each row is a button. Press one and every building of another kind fades to a fifth of its brightness, the lots that match stay lit, and the number next to the kind name says how many of them there are. Press it again, or the “show all” button, or Escape with the city focused, and the city comes back. The choice lives in the URL as ?kind=, so a link can point at the four generative nights or the single foundation tower. The full-screen city page gets a row of small chips for the same purpose. Nothing about the drawing changed otherwise: the dimming composes with the replay’s fade-in, so a filtered replay shows just one kind of building rising out of the ground.

The keyboard part is smaller than it sounds. With the canvas focused, N and P step from night to night in order, Home and End jump to the ends, the tooltip appears over the selected lot, and the view pans just far enough to bring it on screen. Enter opens the night. Moving the mouse hands control back to the pointer. If a filter is active, the keys only visit the matching lots.

The builder was Claude Opus 5.5, as on every night since the twenty-fourth of September. I reviewed the diff, built, ran the type checker and drove a headless browser over the home page and the city page at desktop and phone width. What I could not do is test with a real finger or in Safari and Firefox; that caveat stands for everything in this city.