A Live Tail Is Not a Reconstructed Screen

This Milestone Is Future Tense

A phone backgrounds constantly. It rotates. It walks through a tunnel. The working contract already reconnects as a spectator and paints what it can. What it cannot yet promise is a reconstructed screen: parser state, modes, historical resizes, paged retained history that survives those interruptions as if you had not left. That promise is the next milestone. Teaching it as present is a tense error. Teaching it as optional flavor is also wrong — a pocket terminal that cannot survive a lock will never retire the apps it is supposed to replace.

The Mac already knows this pain. Incomplete history recovery across rotated journals and size changes is a named gap on the desktop. The phone, whose lifecycle is meaner, cannot pretend a live byte tail is enough. A tail is what just happened. A checkpoint is what the screen is.

Honesty Until Then

Until checkpoints exist, the working contract must show the gap. An incomplete prefix is not "in sync." A blank that looks like the start of the job is a lie. Bounded chunks of retained replay may reconstruct what they can. The rest is a visible limitation, not a silent hole. The destination is complete checkpoints including parser and resize state. The present is an honest partial.

A live tail is not a screen. The destination is checkpoints. Until they exist, name the gap. Do not paint an old fragment as the whole job.

Code

Tail versus checkpoint, present versus destination·text

PRESENT
  reconnect as spectator
  replay a complete prefix if you have one
  else show: "history is truncated here"
  live bytes after that, in order
  no pretend-sync on an incomplete prefix

DESTINATION (do not present-tense)
  bounded screen checkpoints:
    parser state, modes, last size, alt-screen, cursor
  paged retained history across rotate / background / large output
  external keyboard + Korean IME hardening on that reconstructed screen

# A tail answers "what just arrived."
# A checkpoint answers "what would I see if I had never left."

Exercise

You background the phone during a long compile, rotate it, come back. Write what the present contract should show if the prefix is incomplete, and what the destination should show if checkpoints exist. If those two paragraphs are identical, you have mixed the tenses.

Hint

Present names the truncation. Destination names the screen as it would have been. Same user motion, different honesty.

This Milestone Is Future Tense

Honesty Until Then

Code

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Exercise

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