Presenting

housecast grade present serves a built deck to a room, taking anonymous votes.

Two servers, because a flag is not a wall

serve is the grader's and present is the room's, as separate processes, so the only thing dividing a private critique from an audience is which one runs. The tempting shape is one server with a mode. Nothing is authenticated for a viewer, so a boolean would be the single thing between /api/session and a room, and it cannot fail closed. Two commands can. present binds openly and has no route returning a grading session, because it loads none.

What the room may know, and when

A round unlocks one thing per state and withholds the rest rather than sending everything and hiding it. Seeing a verdict before voting would spoil the round and corrupt the split it produces.

• commitments - the commitments
• case - adds the prompt and the response
• open - adds a count of votes cast, never a direction
• split - adds the tally
• reveal - adds the label, critique, and evidence span

The count-not-direction rule lives in the API rather than a page's discipline. A running split anchors later voters to the early ones, so the reading stops being of the room and becomes one of whoever went first.

What is authenticated, which is almost nothing

No viewer authenticates and none is identified. A vote carries a device token the browser minted itself so re-voting replaces, and votes are discarded on exit. advance and back need a token present prints on startup, because a room that can close a vote is a live failure with an audience watching. That thinness bounds the number: a phone and a laptop count twice, so the split reads a room rather than being a statistic.

See also

• deck.md - the artifact it serves, and what it refuses to build.