**Two sources an AI draft can draw on**, both off until an administrator turns
them on, both appended to the prompt as extra material rather than woven into
it — so a draft with nothing to draw on is byte-for-byte the draft that has
been working well.
- *The clinical library.* The indexed shelf the clinical assistant already
searches, over MCP on the internal network. Ported from ped-ai: sessions are
reused, a dead one is reopened once, and a library that cannot be reached
never fails the article — it just means the educator is writing without it,
and the progress line says so.
- *PubMed.* NCBI's E-utilities, no key required. Ported whole, including the
two lessons that cost somebody an afternoon over there: PubMed ANDs every
term, so "bronchiolitis management in infants" can find nothing where
"bronchiolitis management" finds six — hence the query ladder — and three
esearch calls in a row will trip the rate limit, hence the spacing. The
reference list is written from the records rather than by the model, so every
line is a paper that exists with a PMID somebody can look up.
Measured on the live stack: 24 excerpts, 6 papers, 6 references, 6 in-text
citations, in one draft.
**The card system, which turned out to be half-built:**
- There was no way to make a deck by hand, and no way to edit a card at all —
you could browse, view and delete. Both are there now, the editor taking
front, back and a picture.
- Filing, writing, sharing and deleting are all educator work now, behind one
named gate rather than four scattered checks. A learner studies.
- A deck generated from an article inherits that article's category instead of
landing in Uncategorized for somebody to file by hand.
- A link inside a card previewed instead of going. A card is a box a few lines
tall, often inside a flipping panel, and a hover card anchored in one is
clipped by it — so the link read as broken because clicking it did nothing.
Where there is no room to preview, the honest behaviour is to take you there.
**An AI draft belonged to no editorial queue.** Nothing set `generated_by`, so
a drafted article was neither "generated, unread" nor anything else: the tile
counted it and there was nowhere to click. Drafts are stamped with the model
that wrote them, and there is now a plain Drafts queue that cannot be fallen
through.
**The sign-in code email** is laid out rather than written: the code is the
biggest thing on the screen, then which account it signs into, then a way back
to the page, then permission to ignore the whole thing.
Also: a back link out of a deck, in the same words as the rest of the app.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01TqXevQJhxFrM7jJg82cgZN
**The API.** Every route now lives under `/api/v1`, with `/api/...` rewritten
onto it — one route, two spellings, so they cannot drift and the OpenAPI
document describes each endpoint once. Errors carry an `error` object with a
stable code, one human sentence and, for a validation failure, the fields that
were wrong; `detail` is untouched so nothing that reads it breaks. The whole
surface — 320 routes, their parameters and their status codes — is checked in
as `backend/tests/api-contract.json`, and a test fails on any difference,
naming the routes that moved. `docs/api.md` is the contract in prose.
**Refresh tokens**, so an app can stay signed in without keeping a password.
Rows rather than signatures: listable, withdrawable, stored as hashes, rotated
on every use. A spent token coming back ends the whole session, because a theft
and a replay look identical from the server and the safe reading is the unsafe
one. A browser is not given one — it has nowhere to put it and a person to ask.
**An end-to-end stack**: `docker-compose.test.yml` with its own Postgres and
Redis, `e2e/seed.py` for the smallest world the tests name, and Playwright with
five projects — desktop, iPhone, Pixel, iPad and a browserless API project.
Devices because every bug reported this week was a phone bug found by a person
looking at a screenshot; a desktop-only suite would have passed through all of
them. Forty tests, five clean runs.
It found four things in its first hour:
- **A fresh deploy could not start.** `create_all()` ran before
`CREATE EXTENSION vector`, so any database that had never had pgvector
installed died on the first table with a vector column. Invisible here
because this one has had the extension for a year.
- **A figure in a published article was a 404 for everyone but an admin.**
Media in the library is nobody's to read by default, and nothing made an
exception for a drawing an article actually shows — so every illustration
added this week was an empty box for every real user.
- **Every rate limit was one bucket for the whole site.** The backend saw
nginx's address for every request, so ten bad passwords from anybody locked
out everybody, and no log line could say who. nginx now takes the real
address from the proxy and overwrites the header on the way in; uvicorn runs
with --proxy-headers.
- **The reading page's breakpoints disagreed** — 1150px in the component,
820px in the stylesheet. Between them the menu button claimed the contents
drawer and then toggled a class on a rail that was still in the layout: the
contents did not open and the site menu did not either. The button was dead
on every tablet.
And two smaller ones: the login limiter counted successful sign-ins, so eleven
people behind one hospital NAT locked each other out — it is cleared by a
correct password now; and `/uploads/{path}` served GET and HEAD from one route
with one operation id, which makes every OpenAPI client generator refuse the
document.
The first admin's password is generated and printed once at first start when
`DEFAULT_ADMIN_PASSWORD` is blank, rather than the account not existing:
`docker compose logs backend | grep -A3 "FIRST ADMIN"`.
CI (`.forgejo/workflows/tests.yml`) runs the backend suite, the contract, the
frontend suite and the build on every push to dev, main or master, and the
end-to-end stack on those branches and on pull requests into them.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01TqXevQJhxFrM7jJg82cgZN
**Caching.** `/uploads` answered `private, no-store` for everything, so a page
of forty thumbnails re-fetched forty images every time it was drawn. A
derivative may now be kept for a week by the browser that asked for it —
`private`, never a shared cache, because a shared cache in front of
access-controlled images is how one learner is served another's figure. It is
safe to keep because it cannot change: `thumbs/256/<key>` is made once from an
immutable original. Originals still say no-store.
**The embedding model is env-only.** Every vector in the database came from it,
and vectors from different models are not comparable — change it and search
returns noise until 3,000 questions, 334 articles and every card have been
re-embedded. The settings page now shows it as text with Test and Regenerate
beside it, and the API refuses a change rather than ignoring one, naming
`LITELLM_EMBEDDING_MODEL` in the refusal.
**The figure audit retries and gives up.** Its second run met a proxy outage and
reported all 327 figures unreadable, having changed nothing but spent the time.
Three tries each with backoff now, and it aborts after twelve consecutive
failures: a run that says "everything is unreadable" has told you nothing.
**`.env.example` is complete.** It listed 23 of the 53 settings; it now lists
all of them, grouped, each with the default it falls back to and — where it
matters — what happens if it is wrong.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01TqXevQJhxFrM7jJg82cgZN
Proof-of-work rather than a puzzle, and — the reason for it — nothing
about the person signing up is described to a third party in order to let
them in. Turnstile and then hCaptcha were both here; both told Cloudflare
who was at the door.
The `cap` service runs on the compose network with its own Redis
database, kept apart from the app's so a flush of one cannot clear the
other's challenges. The widget talks to /cap/ on this origin, proxied by
the frontend's nginx, so the browser reaches nobody else either. Caddy
passes the whole host through to that container, so it needed no change.
Two things that had to be found rather than read:
Cap's key API is undocumented. The routes are `/auth/login` and
`/server/keys`, and the Bearer value is base64 JSON of `{token, hash}` —
not the session token itself, which is why the obvious call returns
"Malformed session token". The site key and secret were created that way
rather than by hand in a dashboard.
And an nginx proxy_pass whose target is a variable passes the URI through
untouched: the trailing slash that strips a location prefix on a literal
target does nothing. Cap was being asked for /cap/<key>/challenge and
answering NOT_FOUND until the prefix was stripped by an explicit rewrite.
Verified end to end against the running service: a challenge is issued
through the public path, and a token that was never issued is refused
rather than waved through.
Also here: the register modal's Name and Email were bare labels that
neither wrapped their input nor named it, so a screen reader met two
boxes with no names and clicking the word did nothing.
And the knowledge profile paginates ten to a page and expands each row to
its two bars beside the next step. "Correct using hints" is missing from
that bar because /study-tools/recommendations does not carry it per
topic — inferring it from the lifetime figure would be a different set of
answers, so the bar is honestly two-tone until the backend offers it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01TqXevQJhxFrM7jJg82cgZN
One verifier, backend/app/services/captcha.py, and one widget,
components/Captcha.jsx. There were two copies of each and they had
drifted: the register widget loaded the script itself while the landing
one relied on a page-level effect elsewhere in its file, and on the
backend auth failed *open* on an unreachable Turnstile while contact
failed *shut*.
Both failure modes were kept rather than one quietly chosen, as an
explicit `fail_open` argument with the reason written down: an outage that
stops people creating accounts costs the site its users, while an outage
that bounces a contact message costs the sender one retry.
An unconfigured secret still skips verification entirely, as before, so a
site with no keys keeps working.
The keys in .env are empty. The Cloudflare ones there were live and are
now dead, so **there is no captcha on register or contact until hCaptcha
keys are issued** — this is not a state to leave a public site in.
Also corrected on the way: docs/frontend.md still documented
`login(email, password, turnstileToken)`, whose third argument had
already gone from AuthContext.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01TqXevQJhxFrM7jJg82cgZN
- FastAPI backend with JWT auth, roles (admin/moderator/user)
- PDF upload (up to 500MB) with streaming, PyMuPDF text extraction
- ChromaDB vectorization per page with metadata
- LiteLLM AI question extraction from PDF (not generation)
- Image extraction from PDF pages, graceful fallback
- Quiz modes: timed (countdown timer) + learning (answers shown inline)
- Page-by-page question navigation with dot navigator
- TTS endpoint using LiteLLM (Google Vertex / OpenAI voices)
- Admin dashboard: AI model management per task, user role management
- Moderator role: upload PDFs, create sections, generate quizzes
- Spaced repetition reminders via SMTP email (SM-2 intervals)
- APScheduler daily reminder jobs
- Celery + Redis for background PDF processing
- React frontend with all pages
- Docker Compose deployment (nginx + backend + celery + redis)
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>