What It Costs
A background recorder has to be cheap enough to forget. The final design has a small set of numbers that define that budget.
One history repository per project. One branch and one index per worktree. Active worktrees poll every ten seconds, idle
ones back off to two minutes, and a quiet project hibernates after five minutes without a snapshot. The worktree
metadata watcher costs one ReadDir per project every two seconds. Compaction keeps at least fifty snapshots and thins
by hour, day and week after that. A diff detail is capped at 500 files and 256 KiB; a label at 120 characters.
None of these are benchmarks. They are limits chosen so the recorder does not become the loudest process on the machine.
The Price
The real price is that the history is not in the project’s remote. git clone does not bring it, and a lost disk takes
it with everything else. That is the cost of keeping the project graph clean: the snapshots live in a second repository
that the project does not know about.
The answer is not a silent sync. An optional, explicit remote backup is planned, and it has to treat secrets with the same care as the copy rules. Until then, the history is local by design, and the documentation says so.
What Is Still Missing
The core has been tested, not yet lived in for weeks. Onboarding still needs a proper first-run path. Packaging and installers are not written. Smart open only knows the Linux PWA launcher; other platforms fall back to the OS handler. The PWA title bar uses the Window Controls Overlay, which only exists in an installed app.
Sync and telemetry are non-goals. A recorder that phones home is a different product.
The Next Test
The next test is not another feature. It is leaving the recorder running and noticing, months later, that the project graph is still clean and that the history was there when it was needed. Everything in this series exists to make that boring outcome possible.
A snapshot store is a second history, not a second branch. The project graph stays clean not because cleanliness is pretty, but because it is what makes the recorder safe to leave running.