The top of an answer is one line that says what the Coach is doing right
now (thinking, fetching a metric, summarising the readings, writing),
live from the activity frames, with the seconds so far. It never opens
by itself: the trail stays closed while the turn runs, when it asks,
when it stops early, after the answer and after a reload, and opens
only on a tap. Once the answer is in, the line settles into one summary
of lookups and seconds. A table read during the turn shows as a
one-line preview with a sparkline until the answer takes it over.
Clarifying choices, follow-ups and the answers to a fact or plan
proposal share one pattern: quiet pills in the answer's column whose
tap sends the label as the person's own message. The clarification
card and the in-thread plan card are gone. A fact the Coach kept is one
meta line with Undo, an assumption one line with Change. The remember
button on a message now keeps it in the Coach's memory.
Unit tests for the turn budget and the no-progress brake, the budgeted
loop (every stop reason, the round-by-round ledger, repeated calls,
questions, comparisons, reasoning and provider state), the trail recorder
and its screen, clarifications through the tool and the brake, the
comparison table and chart, the trail column and its owner-only read, the
reply frames, and the turn's frames end to end through the route. An
integration test proves the trail against a real database. Eval
scenarios cover a multi-round why question, a period comparison with its
chart, a question asked through the tool, and keep the charts the
existing table scenarios already showed.
Take the effective reasoning level from the route rather than resolving
it in the turn; the turn only caps it when the operator pays.
Marc-André Bombeck