livef12rocks/SOUL.md

SOUL.md — Project Character

Product Name

live.f12.rocks

One-Liner

Event photo pep pipeline: Syncthing drop -> gmic/rembg -> web. Upload a photo at the event, get back weird/fun filtered variants seconds later.

Vision

At an event (f12 meetup/party), someone drops a photo into a Syncthing folder from a phone/camera rig. A worker rips the background off, runs it through a random gmic filter/blend chain, and a handful of variants show up on a shared web page almost immediately — no app install, no login, no waiting for someone to "process the photos later". If a variant is fun, remix it with different filters right there. Finished jobs sync back to the phone via the same Syncthing share.

Audience

Event organizers and attendees at f12 events, on their phones, often on bad venue wifi. Nobody signs up, nobody logs in. Whoever has the link (and whoever's syncing photos in) is the whole audience.

Tone & Wording

• Voice: direct, casual, no explaining-the-obvious. It's a fun tool for an event, not enterprise software.
• Formality: du. Short German labels in the UI (Ansehen, Remix, Download, Varianten, Zwischenschritte).
• Error messages: say what broke, don't blame the visitor — most errors here are gmic filter flakiness, not user error.
• Forbidden words/phrases: no corporate buzzwords, no "Erlebnis", no fake enthusiasm ("Wow!", "Amazing!"). Keep it matter-of-fact.

Wording Examples

Context	Good	Bad
Success	Remix erzeugt.	Dein Kunstwerk ist fertig! 🎉
Error	Foreground-Filter fehlgeschlagen: Timeout nach 120s	Etwas ist schiefgelaufen.
Empty state	Noch keine Jobs. Bild in den Sync-Ordner legen, dann kurz warten.	Hier ist noch nichts los... lade doch was hoch! 😊

Design

• Palette: dark background (#14161a), off-white text, one warm accent color (#ff5a1f) for primary actions/links. No gradients.
• Feel: utilitarian, mobile-first, touch-friendly. Think backstage tool, not a consumer photo app. Deliberately avoids the generic "purple AI gradient + rounded blob" look.

Non-Goals

• No web auth / accounts / login product — anyone with the link sees everything, by design, for this event tool.
• No camera-to-phone client in this repo — upload path is Syncthing (phone/folder setup is out of band).
• No beamer/projector product built into this repo.
• Not a DAM (digital asset manager) — no albums, tagging, search, retention policies. incoming/, variants/, and intermediates/ are the whole data model.
• No auto-deletion of incoming uploads. Ever. The worker only reads/copies.
• No Syncthing container in this compose — Syncthing runs on the host.

Infrastructure (project-local)

• Workdir on server: /home/frank/live.f12.rocks
• Data volume (Syncthing share): ${DATA_HOST_DIR} — prod default /home/frank/sync.schwenk.online/data/livef12, local override ./data. Bind-mounted into worker and web at /data (see compose.yml).
• Layout under the share:
  • incoming/ — phone drop
  • variants/ — {stem}_original.jpg, {stem}_rembg.png, {stem}_vN.png
  • intermediates/ — {stem}_vN_*.png (incl. _post_0 …)
  • meta/ — web bookkeeping JSON (optional .stignore on phone)
  • processed.json
• Domain: live.f12.rocks, routed via the shared external traefik network, TLS via myresolver (see INFRASTRUCTURE.md).
• rembg model cache lives in the named Docker volume rembg_cache, not under the Syncthing share — container state, not event data.

Project-Specific Rules

- Never delete or move files under incoming/ from worker code — Syncthing
  is the writer there. (reason: uploads are the one copy of the original
  that exists outside a phone's camera roll)
- Keep every intermediate image under intermediates/ — don't clean them
  up automatically. (reason: useful for debugging bad filter picks,
  disk is cheap compared to re-running gmic)
- gmic/rembg subprocess calls always run under `nice` (see NICE_LEVEL) —
  the worker box needs to stay responsive for other things during an
  event. (reason: explicit requirement, avoid CPU starvation)

---

Agent Instructions

When updating this file:

• Keep rules unambiguous — formality of tone doesn't matter, clarity does
• Include wording for user-facing text; colors are optional
• When Fränky says "in this project, never X", add it here or in BOUNDARIES.md (agent proposes which)