EP-0038: The Hicasso View-Layer Programme¶

Status: accepted Type: standards-track Created: 2026-07-30 Resolution: accepted 2026-07-30 (HD-001–HD-021 resolved under delegated authority; operator-overturnable); HD-022–HD-028 resolved under that same authority; P2 fork ruled by the operator directly 2026-08-13 (HD-029 — Hicasso graduates, as a success)

Abstract¶

Hicasso (re-frame.hicasso, alias h) is re-frame2's third and final native view-layer attempt: interpreted Hiccup on a UIx-class React function-component host, optimised for re-frame2 — a better UIx with hiccup interpretation, not a better Reagent. The programme is a bounded product experiment, not a rewrite mandate: a measured browser-only bar built first, a composed donor arm as a stop-gate before any API exists, a two-arm spike tournament under a six-week clock with pre-registered kill criteria, and an operator fork ruling that graduates exactly one arm — or stops, with "adapters + sugar" recorded as a successful outcome. On a win, the public Freehand and re-frame.ui surfaces are deleted (no absorption programme); on a loss, the adapters stand. The durable design record is docs/design/hicasso/ (excluded from the published site, read in the source tree — the EP-0036 precedent); every design decision is resolved in docs/design/hicasso/decisions.md (HD-001–HD-029).

Motivation¶

Two prior attempts (EP-0030's re-frame.ui; EP-0036's Freehand) validated the authoring model — data views, sub-as-value, intent-as-data; zero correctness failures ever recorded — and failed on runtime economics, discovering their deficits after the build (bulk re-render ~10× Reagent in the browser; per-boundary retained memory multiples of both Reagent and UIx). The measured post-mortems attribute the cost to two mechanisms (a per-read dependency ledger and a per-boundary shell) whose residual costs Hicasso re-prices under explicit budgets with tripwires, and identify the fastest measured arm in the repo — a UIx-class React FC — as the correct runtime parent. What users demonstrably miss on that parent is precisely hiccup-as-data and intent-as-data: that is the product. The ultimate test is speed in the browser — fast applications, not fast SSR or fast test lanes.

Specification¶

The programme runs as three waves of beads under one epic. Authority and detail live in the design record: charter.md, architecture.md, validation.md, authoring.md, and decisions.md under docs/design/hicasso/. Where this EP and those pages ever differ, decisions.md governs, then validation.md.

Glossary for this EP: "donor arm" = the composed spike built from parts the existing adapters donate (reagent-slim :f> + UIx use-subscribe) — distinct from the "donor trees" (the Freehand/re-frame.ui source trees, EP-0036's sense). "Adapter-Prime" = that same composition ridden forward through the whole tournament as the adapters-plus-sugar null hypothesis — the referent of "null" in the P2 ruling.

Wave 0 — governance, the bar, and the draft guide (parallel-safe; off-clock)¶

The standard bead (operator-owned): the two-number bar (ship ≤ 1.0× Reagent like-for-like on the clock; 1.5× bulk architecture-kill), the browser-numbers-only rule, the budgets, kill criteria K1–K7, the UIx red-zone ratio protocol, the clock definition, the HD-002 adjudication clauses, and the P2 decider protocol (the operator decides; recorded adversarial + creative reviews advise; the earlier donor-gate ruling is a delegated advisory ruling, operator-overturnable — HD-013).
The like-for-like instruments, filed as fresh beads (the prior instrument beads rf2-mapni / rf2-m7xs7 / rf2-ssn1o are closed do-not-refile specification donors, per their own close direction): Reagent-on-subs mount and bulk arms, the ratom-spine write+flush leg, a UIx-on-subs arm, and the 1/3/7/20 reads-per-boundary heap ladder.
W1 baseline carry-over (already resolved in the tracked record): P0 carries ≈2.99–3.08× floor / ≈1.9–2.0× Reagent into the baseline table; the residual dominance-attribution question rides its own existing bead.
The draft user guide (parallel, operator-requested): first-cut guide pages into docs/design/hicasso/draft-guide/, written per docs/AUTHORING.md against the designed authoring surface (the grouped default and the collector-contingent sketch, clearly caveated) — explicitly disposable, to be redone properly after P2 against the real implementation; excluded from the published site with the rest of the design tree.

Wave 1 — the stop-gate and the tournament¶

The composed donor arm (HD-008): two rungs — (i) :f> + runtime hiccup + UIx subs; (ii) plus one frame-context hook and native event-vector lowering. Off-clock; its stop/continue ruling is a delegated advisory ruling issued only against the published P0 baseline table. Stop here — before any API — if it cannot clearly beat both Reagent paths and stay inside the UIx red-zones.
The shared front half is built once, as the first post-gate tournament work item, alongside the witness-set build: the codec (extracted from reagent-slim's measured plumbing), the subscription→boundary index (graduating the spike-01 model into the tracked bench/test tree, HD-017), and intent lowering. The donor arm's rung-(ii) lowering is a minimal disposable slice, not the shared build. The dogfood screen's shared app/state code lives with the bench trees per HD-017.
The tournament (HD-007; the six-week clock starts at the first Hicasso-arm commit that mounts the dogfood screen, HD-014): Hicasso lean-React and Hicasso/PATCH arms on the shared front half and identical witnesses, Adapter-Prime riding every measurement; the HD-002 sub-read tiers instrumented; the dogfood screen written in three renderings (collector, grouped, raw UIx) as the ergonomics half of the verdict; witness set, red-zones, and measurement discipline per validation.md.

Wave 2 — the fork ruling and (on a go) v0¶

P2 ruling (HD-013): the decider is the operator; one adversarial and one creative review pass over the P0/P1 evidence are prepared and recorded on the standard bead to advise the ruling. Outcomes: graduate exactly one arm into a tracked implementation/hicasso/ artefact and build v0 (five tier-1 shapes, controlled input R-A1/R-A2, one host hatch, the short guide — charter §Use cases), or stop with adapters-as-success.
On a go, wave 3 is filed only then: donor-surface deletion per HD-018, the real guide (superseding the wave-0 draft), skill/migration work, and the product-phase roster.

Sequencing law¶

Wave-0 beads are parallel-safe (bench trees, the design tree, and the tracker only). The donor arm may run alongside wave 0; tournament arms dispatch only after the donor gate passes and the standard bead carries P0's numbers. Before the P2 graduation, nothing in this programme edits spec/*, release workflows, or the Freehand/re-frame.ui src trees — with one carve-out: the bench/test measurement lane (e.g. implementation/freehand/test/.../bench/) is the programme's measurement apparatus and accepts instrument-only merges (HD-017). Runtime skeletons stay off main until the P2 graduation; arms needing new build ids or dev-http ports touch the hot-zone implementation/shadow-cljs.edn and are sequenced, never parallel. Results publish to beads and docs/design/hicasso/studio/. The programme does not contend with the release train.

Rationale¶

Measure-first with a null control is the direct inversion of both predecessors' failure shape (bars discovered at 90% built; no dignified stop; success defined as machinery absorbed rather than product preferred). The two-arm tournament exists because the lean arm's honest ceiling inside React may be UIx-parity while only the own-renderer family can beat the frontier on bulk and memory — a question only instruments can settle. The read-mechanism ladder (grouped default, collector challenger, scalar comparator) puts the burden of proof on the mechanism class that killed the predecessor while keeping the authoring surface that justifies the product alive as the hardest-ridden challenger. Full per-decision rationale lives with each HD record.

Backwards Compatibility¶

Nothing published changes during waves 0–2: the adapters (Reagent, reagent-slim, UIx) remain first-class and untouched; the Freehand and re-frame.ui trees are frozen except the bench/test measurement lane; no released artefact depends on any programme output. On a P2 "go", wave 3 executes HD-018 (delete the public donor surfaces; spec/004-family re-homing per Graduation below). On a stop, the repo's shipped surface is exactly what it was.

Resolved Decisions¶

The twenty-one design decisions resolved at acceptance are in docs/design/hicasso/decisions.md; dispositions in brief: HD-001 name/alias · HD-002 sub-read tiers (grouped default / collector challenger / scalar comparator; both-fail→null) · HD-003 hooks placement rule (taught, not policed) · HD-004 accelerants arm-scoped · HD-005 evidence seam only · HD-006 no default memoization · HD-007 two equal-class arms · HD-008 donor stop-gate · HD-009 no local, sugar unfrozen · HD-010 theming laws, no Hicasso context · HD-011 defhost + the one [:>] escape · HD-012 clock-only ship bar, UIx red-zones · HD-013 deciders (operator at P2; delegated advisory at the donor gate) · HD-014 the clock · HD-015 start now · HD-016 invocation + component ABI · HD-017 code residence + bench-lane carve-out · HD-018 delete-on-win · HD-019 the synchronous door · HD-020 v0 host mechanics · HD-021 root/HMR/headless.

The series has since grown to HD-029, and the last entry does not share the others' provenance. HD-022–HD-028 were resolved under the same delegated authority as the twenty-one above — HD-022 :ref's reserved vector value-space · HD-023 the :& attribute merge · HD-024 one callback form · HD-025 presence-as-data · HD-026 the ::h/prevent head · HD-027 route-link's ::h/navigate head · HD-028 value equality as the boundary default. HD-029, the P2 fork, was given by the operator directly on 2026-08-13 — the decider HD-013 reserves that ruling to — and is therefore not a delegated resolution. Each entry carries its own rationale and reopen condition in decisions.md.

Operator rulings made under this EP — the donor-gate ruling and the P2 fork ruling — are recorded here when made (per EP-0009 rule 2), with their evidence on the standard bead. The P2 fork ruling is the 2026-08-13 addendum below.

Addendum, 2026-07-31 — Hicasso is a React adapter; Arm 2 (PATCH) is dropped¶

Operator ruling (Mike), verbatim: "I want hicasso to be an adaptor for React that is optimised for re-frame2, user ergonomics and performance. I don't want ARM 2 (PATCH)."

Recorded here per rule 2, and as an addendum rather than an edit per EP-0009 rule 3 — the wave-1/wave-2 text above is left as written, because it is the proposal that was accepted and the tournament it describes did run.

HD-007 (two equal-class arms) is superseded. There is one arm: lean-React, and it is the product line rather than a contender.
The tournament ended on product direction, not on measurement. Arm 2 met its hard gate — controlled-restore on the 100-cell grid in real Chromium, 920 tests / 5,743 assertions / 0 failures, no act(), no flushSync, no rAF. It is dropped because the operator does not want an own renderer, not because it could not build one. Its bench tree was retired afterwards (rf2-m6if4).
What the ruling did not decide. The arm-versus-null question stands: the Adapter-Prime null control still rides every measurement, adapters-only is still a successful outcome, and the kill criteria still bite. The P2 ruling is now a two-way choice, not a three-way one.
What survives from Arm 2: the laziness finding (a for's reads happen when the children are walked, not when the body returns — a Surface B property that applies to the adapter directly); the structural observation that HD-002(a)'s ownership state machine is near-vacuous when the body runs inside the commit and live when React owns the render phase, which puts the candidate-ledger tripwire fully in force for the adapter; and the controlled-restore witness as evidence of what correct input behaviour looks like.

Evidence and full text on rf2-2rtt6. Design record updated in docs/design/hicasso/ (rf2-m6if4).

Addendum, 2026-07-31 — Surface B (the ambient collector) is the only ergonomically acceptable read surface; HD-002's outcome 2 is closed¶

Operator ruling (Mike), verbatim: "Only surface B is acceptable from an ergonomics point of view" (citing docs/design/hicasso/draft-guide/02-views-and-reads.md), reinforced, verbatim: "use-subs (Surface A) is not sufficiently ergonomic for a programmer to use."

Recorded here per rule 2, and as an addendum rather than an edit per EP-0009 rule 3 — the Resolved Decisions summary line for HD-002 above ("sub-read tiers (grouped default / collector challenger / scalar comparator; both-fail→null)") is left as written, because it is the proposal that was accepted and the adjudication it describes did run.

What is ruled. Of the two real candidates the draft guide sets out, Surface B — the ambient collector, where sub is an ordinary function call usable inside a when, inside a for, and inside an inlined helper, with one fixed runtime hook collecting reads and the runtime diffing the edge set after the body returns — is the only ergonomically acceptable authoring surface. Surface A (grouped use-subs) — one hook at the top of the body receiving the complete query collection before the body runs — is ergonomically rejected, judged below the usability bar for the programmer this library exists to serve, not merely less pleasant than Surface B.
What is not ruled, and must not be read into this. The collector's correctness and cost gates are untouched and still bind: the standing tripwire that overrides the clock (the first time correctness requires a candidate ledger or generic post-render dependency reconciliation, the collector dies however good its numbers look); the four pre-registered adjudication clauses ((a) the render/commit ownership state machine, (b) the exact allowed edge-diff operation vs. the forbidden ledger class, (c) two pre-registered strategy hypotheses each counted only by a benchmarked commit, (d) the survival metric); and docs/design/hicasso/hd-002-adjudication.md stands as written. This ruling was decided on ergonomics, not on HD-002's own benchmarked-win condition — no bar row for the survival metric existed at ruling time (H1 implemented, H2 untried), so grouped is superseded without having lost a bench it was never run against; the distinction is carried in implementation/freehand/test/re_frame/bench/hicasso/arm1/runtime.cljs's docstring, next to the code that implements the ruled surface.
The consequence. HD-002's outcome 2 — "collector loses and grouped stays the default" — is closed. If the ambient collector trips its ledger tripwire or fails its survival metric, the outcome is null (no Hicasso read surface ships), or a mechanism not currently on the table must earn its way in. Shipping grouped use-subs as the product read surface is ruled out on ergonomics, independently of any measurement.

Evidence and full text on rf2-2rtt6.1 ("RULING — HD-002 FORK, ERGONOMICS HALF"). Design record: docs/design/hicasso/decisions.md HD-002 (superseded blockquote), docs/design/hicasso/studio/arm1-lean-react-dogfood-judgement.md §2.

Addendum, 2026-08-04 — SSR + hydration is required Hicasso scope; the programme rides Spec 011¶

Operator ruling (Mike), verbatim: "SSR is an important part of re-frame2. If hicasso is to be the re-frame native view layer then it has to be used with SSR" — and, earlier the same day, verbatim: "hicasso is useless unless it does SSR."

Recorded here per rule 2, and as an addendum rather than an edit per EP-0009 rule 3 — the wave text and the Non-goals section below are left as written. HD-020(d) ("SSR is out of v0") carried its own reopening clause — "at product phase (SSR, richer boundary API) by ordinary ruling" — and this is that ruling, taken by the operator. The design record carries the matching HD-020 addendum (docs/design/hicasso/decisions.md).

The requirement set, R0–R8.
R0 — one SSR story. Hicasso participates in re-frame2's existing Spec 011 (spec/011-SSR.md) mechanism — the payload policy, the #__rf_payload EDN embed, the hydrate! boot helper and the reserved :rf/hydrate db adoption before first render, the hydration-mismatch machinery, ssr-ring as the HTTP host — never a parallel Hicasso-only mechanism.
R1 — pure server render. A server render is produced purely from a db snapshot.
R2 — hydration adopts. Zero hydration mismatch, server node identity preserved (React adopts the server DOM, never re-creates it), and exactly one body pass.
R3 — reactivity adopted on hydrateRoot's schedule. Subscriptions come live on React's own hydration schedule; the settle horizon is best-effort, never a caller contract.
R4 — the live page. Events and the controlled door work post-hydration to the rf2-2rtt6.67 equivalence standard.
R5 — the defhost SSR policy is activated. HD-011's declared placeholder becomes the real :ssr option — three values as of 2026-08-05 (rf2-l0wfx): :client-only (the default), a {:fallback …}, and :render, which is the author asserting the component is server-safe and is the only policy under which a crossing's children reach the server response. A declared fallback is inert markup by enforcement (rf2-nv07k).
R6 — the ledger discipline holds server-side. HD-002's discipline is unbroken on the server: a server render is an abandoned render, leaving zero durable registration.
R7 — scope is stated known-losses style.
R8 — witnesses carry SHA + repro commands.
Non-goals, explicitly: streaming, RSC, islands/partial hydration, no-JS progressive enhancement, SEO metadata, and SSR-speed-as-bar — HD-012 and the Motivation's "fast applications, not fast SSR" line stand unchanged.
The sitting linkage — one sitting, no separate gate. The X1–X5 spike witness on the hydrated dogfood screen (rf2-2rtt6.87) is a required feasibility input to the P2/HD-013 sitting, and the production-server-arm choice — JVM structural walk (the default direction to be priced) vs Node sidecar (rf2-2rtt6.88) — is priced and ruled at that same sitting.
A stale blocker, corrected on the record. The 2026-08-04 audits' claim that the spine's useSyncExternalStore lacks getServerSnapshot — so "hydration throws by construction" — was stale, refuted independently three times: the spine passes its snapshot fn as both the 2nd and 3rd arguments (implementation/core/src/re_frame/substrate/spine.cljs:3031); the arm-1 shells do likewise (implementation/freehand/test/re_frame/bench/hicasso/arm1/runtime.cljs:1540, :1595); and the {:hydrate? true} adoption-reporter tier ships with DOM tests (implementation/ssr/src/re_frame/ssr/boot.cljc:202-213). No core code change is needed for hydration snapshots.

Status is honest tense: the hydration door, the defhost :ssr policy, the Node render entry and the spike witness are dispatched as rf2-2rtt6.84–.87; nothing has landed at the time of this addendum. Evidence and full text on rf2-2rtt6 and rf2-2rtt6.83.

Addendum, 2026-08-04 — K5, the ergonomics kill, is withdrawn; nothing replaces it and no identifier is renumbered¶

Operator ruling (Mike), 2026-08-04. K5 — the criterion whose row read > ~8 public concepts or > ~8 guide pages to ship CRUD — is removed as an operative kill criterion. No verbatim text of the ruling is on the record; its authoritative statement is the dated note beside the kill-criteria table in docs/design/hicasso/validation.md.

Recorded here per rule 2, and as an addendum rather than an edit per EP-0009 rule 3 — the wave-0 line above ("the budgets, kill criteria K1–K7") is left as written, and stays true on its own terms: it is a historical statement of what wave 0 pre-registered, and nothing was renumbered.

What is withdrawn. The one criterion that could stop this programme on ergonomics rather than on measurement. No criterion replaces it, and K6 and K7 keep their identifiers, so every citation of them elsewhere resolves.
What is not. Consumer code from day one, the diff judgement and the public-door-only witness tests all stand (charter.md item 4, which restated the criterion inline without naming it, is superseded in place with its sentence kept). Every by-name "against K5" argument in the design record is left intact and reads as historical — it says why a shape was chosen while the criterion stood.

Design record: docs/design/hicasso/validation.md (the dated note), charter.md item 4, and the note heading the HD-022 … HD-026 block in decisions.md. This addendum answers rf2-825ft.

Addendum, 2026-08-13 — the P2 fork is ruled: Hicasso graduates, as a success¶

Operator ruling (Mike), verbatim: "Make it graduate" … "as success" — given directly in chat on 2026-08-13 at 04:57 AUSEST. That is the decider HD-013 reserves this ruling to; the recorded adversarial and creative passes advised it and did not make it, exactly as that entry provides.

Recorded here per rule 2, and as an addendum rather than an edit per EP-0009 rule 3 — the wave-2 text and the Graduation section are left as written, because they are the proposal that was accepted and the programme they describe did run. Open issue 2 is annotated below in the dated style the two prior addenda used, since that list states what is open now.

What is ruled: the Graduation section's "Go" exit. Hicasso graduates and the programme's outcome is recorded as a success. v0 proceeds in implementation/hicasso/, which is already the live tree, so HD-017's graduation clause is executed by this ruling rather than pending it. The adapters remain first-class alongside it — graduating Hicasso is not a demotion of Reagent, reagent-slim or UIx, which stay supported and stay the standing comparator every Hicasso measurement is taken against (HD-012). Wave 3 — donor-surface deletion per HD-018, the real guide superseding the wave-0 draft, skill/migration work, and the product-phase roster — becomes fileable from here, on its own stated conditions, which this ruling does not discharge.
The held K1 price is accepted, and ratified by this ruling rather than by a sitting. Graduating as a success with the canonical K1 record on the table is the operator's acceptance of the priced capability premium that record prices. The published miss is not recoloured and no threshold widens — acceptance of a price is not a pass, the registered gate is untouched, and no evidence row may cite this ruling to colour K1 green. The accepted price, the use cases it buys, the escape route and the reconsideration trigger are in docs/design/hicasso/product/k1-price-acceptance.md, which records this ruling as the ratifying act; the figures are cited from their own record rather than restated here.
The K7 clock closes, satisfied. The six-week clock (HD-014) ran from the first Hicasso-arm commit that mounted the dogfood screen and the fork was ruled well inside its boundary — satisfied on its own terms rather than extended, and no extension was sought or given. Both endpoints are recorded once, in validation.md.
What the ruling does not decide, stated so it is not over-read. K2's 1.5× architecture kill is not waived and measurement continues under its own protocol; K3's owed disposition is discharged by its own record, not by this ruling; K4's WebKit half of the control matrix is no longer open, having been discharged by the operator's separate ruling of 2026-08-13 (rf2-hic-016) rather than by this one; and K6 stands with its bans on a compiler, an analyzer and a dual mode — the K1 line is priced, not met by a compiler, so nothing here reads as licence to build one. The non-kill rows are unchanged too. Dispositions row by row in validation.md.
The sitting is pre-empted, not adjourned. The packet freeze of 2026-08-25 and the sitting of 2026-08-27 were scheduled to put this question; the question is answered, and neither is required for the fork. The SSR addendum's one-sitting linkage resolves with it: the production-server-arm choice it bound to that sitting had already been ruled on 2026-08-08 (rf2-2rtt6.88) and is untouched by the fork ruling, its five start gates still governing when that arm's implementation begins.

Erratum — 2026-08-13 (rf2-k6bv, from the merged-PR audit of #8029). The last clause above was already false when the PR carrying this addendum merged, and the original text is kept per rule 3. A separate and earlier ruling had started the service: rf2-xpq9 (operator, in session, 2026-08-12 17:36 AUSEST) made every Phase-5 optional product v0 scope and removed rf2-hic-056's "when a named caller activates it" condition; PR #8028 then landed the bounded Node/React service at implementation/ssr-node/ twelve seconds before this addendum did — #8028 merged at 2026-08-12T21:29:24Z,

8029 at 21:29:36Z.¶

What is not corrected is the ruling. The fork ruling recorded above still neither chose the production server arm nor started it: the choice was rf2-2rtt6.88's on 2026-08-08, the start was rf2-xpq9's on 2026-08-12, and neither is this ruling's act. What moves is only the clause's tense.

What the landed service does not discharge, so that "the service exists" is not read as "the arm is done": start gate 3's per-application state projector, with its round-trip corpus and its negative fixture proving an omitted server read fails — the JVM produces that projection and the service can only refuse what arrives outside the allowlist; and start gate 5's end-to-end JVM → Node → JVM topology witness, which has no JVM leg to witness, because ssr-ring's pipeline still hard-calls ssr/render-to-string, the render seam at build-full-response* is unwritten, and nothing deploys or supervises the process. Gates 1, 2 and 4 are answered inside the package and witnessed by its own suite, which is not the same as witnessed across the crossing. - What this EP's own status is not. The Graduation section makes final conditional on v0 and the narrow contract graduation landing — the spec/004 view-family re-homing and EP-0036's supersession — and neither has. This EP stays accepted; the fork ruling starts that work rather than completing it.

Evidence and full text on the epic rf2-2rtt6 (the dated ruling note). Design record written by rf2-2rtt6.144: docs/design/hicasso/decisions.md HD-029, validation.md §"The kill table at graduation", product/k1-price-acceptance.md, product/decision-brief.md, production-server-arm.md. This addendum answers rf2-k6bv.

Addendum, 2026-08-16 — the donor trees are deleted, and the measurement lane moved with them¶

Wave 3's HD-018 deletion executed on 2026-08-16 (rf2-0yp7w, PR #8322): implementation/ui/ and implementation/freehand/ return nothing from git ls-files, and re-frame.freehand and re-frame.ui are no longer public surfaces. Two rules above read against that, and this is what they resolve to rather than a rewrite of the frozen text:

§Sequencing law's bench carve-out names implementation/freehand/test/.../bench/ as the programme's measurement apparatus. That lane moved to implementation/hicasso/test/re_frame/bench/hicasso/ ahead of the cut and is kept as evidence, so every implementation/freehand/test/…/bench/hicasso/… path cited above reads against the same tree at its new root.
§Backwards Compatibility's freeze — "the Freehand and re-frame.ui trees are frozen except the bench/test measurement lane" — was a wave-0..2 rule. The P2 "go" discharged it: the trees are gone, not frozen.

§Graduation's other go-condition is not discharged, and should not be read as a plan in flight. spec/004D was ruled DELETED rather than re-aimed at Hicasso (rf2-0yp7w.11), precisely so donor-era normative text is not laundered into Hicasso's contract, and the disposition of spec/004, spec/004C and the S3/S4/S5 conformance profiles is an open operator question (rf2-h89ri). This EP therefore stays accepted.

Open Issues¶

The donor-gate ruling (delegated advisory; expected days after P0 publishes).
The P2 fork ruling (operator; end of the tournament). Narrowed 2026-07-31 by the addendum above: the choice between the two Hicasso arms is settled, so what remains is the surviving arm against the null. Amended 2026-08-04 by the SSR addendum above: the sitting additionally takes the X1–X5 SSR spike witness (rf2-2rtt6.87) as a required feasibility input, and prices + rules the production-server-arm choice (rf2-2rtt6.88) at the same sitting — one sitting, no separate gate. Resolved 2026-08-13 by the addendum above: the operator ruled the fork directly in chat, pre-empting the sitting — Hicasso graduates, as a success (HD-029).
The HD-002 read-mechanism adjudication (resolved by P1 instrumentation). Narrowed 2026-07-31 by the addendum above: the ergonomics half is decided — Surface B (the ambient collector) is the only acceptable read surface, and grouped use-subs is not a viable fallback. The cost/ correctness half is unaffected and still runs under the unwaived tripwire and the four adjudication clauses.
The residual W1 dominance-attribution bead (does not gate the baseline).

Graduation¶

Standards-track terminal states, made explicit per exit:

Go: v0 lands; the winning public contract graduates narrowly — the spec/004 view-family re-homes from Freehand-voiced text to Hicasso, and EP-0036 is marked superseded by this EP for the view-layer surface; guide impact is assessed then (the wave-0 draft guide is replaced by real docs/core/… pages under the sample gates). This EP goes final when v0 and that graduation land.
Stop (donor gate or P2): this EP goes final with the Resolution line amended to record the null outcome and its evidence; no spec change; open programme beads are closed with the ruling; the adapters are affirmed as the answer. Both exits are successful deliveries of a decided question with receipts.

Non-goals¶

A compiler or analyzer; a second authoring mode; a ViewCell-class per-boundary runtime; a component-local state system; a Hicasso context abstraction; batteries, overlay, SSR-identity, or devtools-glass programmes before the P2 gate; any absorption/migration programme over the donor trees; SSR/JVM render speed as a bar input. The anti-regression fence and banned vocabulary in charter §Constraints are normative for every brief filed under this EP.

References¶

Design record: docs/design/hicasso/ (README · charter · decisions · architecture · validation · authoring; studio/ and draft-guide/ minted by wave-0/1 workers).
Predecessor EPs: EP-0030, EP-0036.
Measured record: docs/design/freehand/studio/ (incl. bulk-rerender-where-the-time-goes.md and the fitness harness fitness-harness.md).
Closed instrument-spec donor beads: rf2-mapni, rf2-m7xs7, rf2-ssn1o (do-not-refile); the retired Freehand standard rf2-lbs3y.
The operator-owned standard bead and the EP-0038 epic bead (ids recorded on the epic at filing).