shader-craftlisted

# Shader craft **Iron Law: a shader ships as a machined floor with a crafted ceiling. The floor is checked blind; the ceiling is seen.** The floor is every rule below that a text-only seat can verify from code and numbers. The ceiling is taste, and taste is Daniel's gate at milestones (`design/CONTRACT.md` §3). Never claim the ceiling from the floor. ## When someone says… (the rule, in ten seconds) | Someone says | The rule | Where | |---|---|---| | "the avatar froze" | A still avatar is the designed safe state: the watchdog holds the last frame after ~2.5 s of back-to-back slow frames, and a hidden tab does zero GPU work. Read the slow-frame streak, never a frames-over-wall-clock fps. A capped or disabled avatar snaps to its state; it does not ease. | Floor 5 · cookbook "Watchdog" | | "the console got slow" | Cost is pixel count × march steps × emitters, on a host with an AMD display-driver crash history: keep the canvas small, cap the steps, undersample the background (never the subject), never open a second GPU context. | Floor 4 · cookbook "Cost" | | "make the background more alive" | Change the cause, not three symptoms; put motion on rates that never line up; then run the loop: bench render, a number beside the image, a pin, fps from a visible window. | Ceiling · The loop | | "black canvas" | Either `isSupported()` refused (no WebGL2, or the OS asked for reduced motion) or the program did not compile. The canvas's data attribute says which; compile before eyeballing.