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Session handover — 2026-05-06

End-of-day note for tomorrow's pickup. Today closed the matcher-gate work and ran garvanbay end-to-end (extract → assemble → build → deploy → visual compare). The verifiers say green; the deployed page exposes three render-layer gaps the verifiers are blind to. Tomorrow's job is to attack those, run verify-design.js for the first time on a real deploy, and decide whether to introduce a routing-regression check.

Where we ended up

  • Branch: master @ 248f90f (pushed to origin).
  • Verifier (20-site phase3 sample): matcher 0 unmatched / 8 total gaps, translator 29 gaps. Down from baseline 35 / 67 / 24.
  • Garvanbay deployed:
  • LIVE: https://www.garvanbay.ie/
  • OURS: https://master.garvanbay-fulldev.pages.dev/ (latest immutable: https://787f0490.garvanbay-fulldev.pages.dev/)
  • Local artifacts:
  • tmp/garvanbay-live.png — full-page LIVE screenshot
  • tmp/garvanbay-ours.png — broken first deploy (CTAStrip overgrab)
  • tmp/garvanbay-ours-v2.png — current state after the revert
  • tmp/snap-pair.js — the script that captures both pages at 1440×900
  • EC2 build directory: ~/replatform-dashboard/builds/garvanbay.ie/assembled-fulldev/ — fresh from this session's clean rebuild (phases 0→4, theme phase failed via networkidle timeout but assemble fell back to defaults).

What today's session shipped

Five commits, in order:

94462e9  matchers + verify-design: drain unmatched bucket, build design gate
cc6f513  matchers: drop the 35 unmatched-section bucket from 35 → 8
c7c315e  matchers: drain remaining 8 → 0 unmatched on phase3 sample
4f0bd59  matchers: drain extraction-gap layer 51 → 8 across phase3 sample
248f90f  matchers/CTAStrip: revert image-less textLen 500 → 300

Net effect on the 20-site verifier:

Metric Before After
Unmatched sections 35 0
Total matcher gaps 67 8
Sites at zero gaps 3 12

New artifacts in the perimeter:

  • lib/matchers/ImageStrip.js — decorative 2+-image rows, plus 1-image full-bleed banners (incl. section-bg-only payloads).
  • lib/matchers/FloatingCTA.js — pinned single-anchor overlays; translator no-ops scroll-to-top FABs (href === '/' or #*).
  • lib/verify-design.js — per-region Gemini call returning a single owner per issue. Built but never run on a real deploy yet.

The three render-layer gaps to attack tomorrow

The matcher gate is genuinely clean. The drift is past the matcher, in translators + components. Each gap below has a concrete first investigation step.

1. Hero renders as dark "GARVANBAY ACCOUNTING" panel instead of LIVE's white photo hero

  • Symptom: OURS hero is a black band with the words "GARVANBAY ACCOUNTING" centered. LIVE has a white-bg section with a photo of an accountant + overlay CTA.
  • Matcher trace (clean): 
    section Hero  score=0.85 head=""    ← matched on first section, no heading
section About score=0.40 head="GARVANBAY ACCOUNTING"
    Hero matched the first content section as expected. About matched the welcome heading section.
  • Suspected layer: translator + hero-4.astro component. The dark bg suggests the component fell back to a default fill instead of rendering the live hero's bgImage / video.
  • Where to start tomorrow:
  • node lib/verify-translator.js garvanbay.ie — focus on the Hero gap. Look at props.backgroundImage / backgroundVideo / slideshowImages flow into hero-4's prop interface.
  • Read lib/components-v3/blocks/hero-4.astro and verify it actually renders image / backgroundImage props. ADR-0003 mentioned the side-image variant was deferred — hero-4 may not support the live hero's layout.
  • If hero-4 lacks the right variant, route to a different fulldev hero (1/2/3/5/7) via translateHero based on signal shape, or extend hero-4.

2. Service-section images render as alt text instead of <img>

  • Symptom: Each of PAYROLL / MANAGEMENT ACCOUNTING / COMPANY SECRETARY / Accounts Preparation / Tax & Advisory shows the literal string "PAYROLL", "MANAGEMENT ACCOUNTING", … below the body text. No actual photo. LIVE shows a photo on each section.
  • Matcher trace (clean): 
    section About score=0.40 head="PAYROLL"           ← x2 (dedupe)
section About score=0.40 head="MANAGEMENT ACCOUNTING"
section About score=0.40 head="COMPANY SECRETARY"
section About score=0.40 head="Accounts Preparation"
section About score=0.40 head="Tax and Advisory"
  • Suspected layer: the alt-as-text suggests content-1.astro is emitting {props.image} as a string somewhere instead of an <img>, OR translateAbout's split logic (returns array [content-1, gallery-wcp] when 3+ images) is dropping the single-image case incorrectly.
  • Where to start tomorrow:
  • Inspect emitted content.ts for one service section — see how About's image / images[] props serialised.
  • Read lib/components-v3/blocks/content-1.astro and check the image-rendering path (Astro <Image> vs raw <img> vs {src} interpolation).
  • translateAbout is the most likely culprit since it's the layer that splits About into multiple blocks. Check lib/assembler-fulldev/translate.js.

3. "Book an appointment" CTA strip mostly empty

  • Symptom: The CTAStrip section between hero and welcome is mostly empty — only a single "056 95555" button visible. LIVE has the full "Book an appointment today to avail of our accounting services" heading + a phone button + an email button.
  • Matcher trace (clean): 
    section CTAStrip score=0.6 head="Book an appointment today to avail of our account..."
    Matcher captured heading. Components picked: cta-wcp.
  • Suspected layer: cta-wcp.astro slot rendering or translateCTAStrip not surfacing the heading + email button correctly. This session added an images[] array to translateCTAStrip — that may have shifted the slot composition.
  • Where to start tomorrow:
  • Read the emitted slot HTML for this section in content.ts.
  • lib/components-v3/blocks/cta-wcp.astro — check that <slot /> renders the heading + body, and that links[] displays each button correctly.

Methodological lesson — verifier-green ≠ render-correct

The first deploy was visually broken (5 service-detail sections collapsed to bare buttons) while the verifier reported 0 unmatched / 8 gaps. Root cause: my round-1 textLen bump in CTAStrip's image-less clause (300 → 500) made PAYROLL et al. (textLen 310-348) match CTAStrip 0.6 over About 0.4. The match was structurally valid (props flowed, the verifier had nothing to flag) but semantically wrong (About-shaped sections rendered as bare CTA tiles).

The matcher gate measures completeness, not routing correctness. The deterministic perimeter as it stands has no gate that catches a correctly-extracted-but-wrongly-routed section.

Two ways forward:

  • Use verify-design.js — that's exactly the gap it's designed to fill (per-region visual diff). It was built today but never exercised. Tomorrow we should run it against the current garvanbay deploy and see whether it picks up all three gaps above.
  • Add a routing-regression manifest — a tiny per-site JSON file pinning the expected matcher for each section ID. CI / verifier flags drift. Cheap to maintain for the ~20 reference sites; catches the failure mode that bit us today before it ships.

Both are low cost. The verify-design route is more general (catches component-render drift too); the manifest route is faster feedback for matcher-routing changes specifically.

Suggested tomorrow's order

  1. Run verify-design.js on the deployed garvanbay (live vs master.garvanbay-fulldev.pages.dev), one region at a time. First real exercise of the gate.
  2. Fix Hero — biggest visible win, single component file.
  3. Fix About → content-1 image rendering — affects 5 sections in one site, also paid forward across the portfolio (every About section uses content-1).
  4. Fix CTAStrip → cta-wcp slot rendering — last visible deploy gap.
  5. Re-deploy and screenshot-compare. If still drifting, that's the signal to introduce the routing-regression manifest.

Translator-gate work (29 gaps across 20 sites, mostly newly-introduced by today's matcher relaxations) is real but can sit until the visible render is right — translator gaps that affect render will show up as render bugs, and the ones that don't aren't urgent.