Devlog #12

Crib mode landed last time. This stretch was about showing the machine off — a hands-off demo for first visitors — and about a feature that didn’t survive contact with reality.

Try me

A Try me button now runs the pitch unattended: default settings, types WETTERVORHERSAGE by itself, and leaves the ciphertext sitting on the output rail. The weather-report text is a quiet nod to the historically correct way in.

Earlier drafts were bossier. The demo used to flip X-ray on and off mid-typing on its own schedule, whatever the user had set — a machine grabbing the controls out of the user’s hands. It also ended by flinging the crack panel open and starting a crib crack unprompted, which in practice meant the panel hijacked the screen after every single run. Both got cut. The demo types, the lamps answer, done.

The replay that didn’t make it

I also built a slow-motion replay: rerun the last keypress over 6.5 seconds in five labeled stages, with stage boundaries computed from the cumulative chord lengths of the actual path curve so the pacing followed the geometry. On paper, lovely. Every fix exposed another seam. In the end the honest call was deletion. The code was fine; the feature wasn’t pulling its weight. It’s gone now

What broke

Two from this stretch, both mine.

The cracker’s minimum-length gate was written for statistics mode and was also blocking crib mode — and crib is precisely the mode that exists for short texts. Any crib run under 30 letters died with “need at least 30 letters.” The gate now applies per mode.

Next: redeploy.