Understory Alpha 2: the name is finished, and so is the excuse-making

Alpha 1 shipped under a half-finished name. The wordmark said Understory. The app's own bundle ID, update feed, and dock icon still said AxiomWeaver underneath. If you'd looked closely enough, you'd have caught the seam.

Alpha 2 closes it. This is the first build where the name is actually finished, not just repainted.

What "finished" means here

Back in June I renamed AxiomWeaver to Understory and did the easy half immediately: the wordmark, the front-door copy, the mark itself (a fern fiddlehead, an unfurling frond). The hard half was the machine identity: the bundle ID, the Cargo binary name, the GitHub update feed, the dock icon. That's the part that actually matters for existing alpha users, because changing it wrong means an update that silently orphans someone's project data.

Alpha 2 does that flip for real. The migration path is built and thoroughly tested (interrupted copies, permission errors, corrupted markers, all the ways this could go wrong on its own). If you installed under the old name, the auto-updater should carry you across with your projects intact. If anything looks wrong after updating, tell us immediately on Discord, don't sit on it. That's the whole point of doing this now, while the install base is still small enough that getting it right matters more than getting it fast.

The record got re-verified, not just re-read

Understory's one non-negotiable job is to never lose what you wrote. Back in July, a UAT pass found real trust bugs: a save status that lied about succeeding, an error message that misdiagnosed the actual problem, toasts that stacked instead of resolving. Those got fixed in July. What hadn't happened since is anyone actually watching the fix hold up on a real build, under real failure conditions, instead of just reading the code and assuming.

For alpha 2 we did that properly: forced real save failures on purpose and watched what the app actually told us. It told the truth. Red "Save failed," the real underlying error, no stacked toasts, no lost prose. That's the bar, and now it's a bar we've actually stood on instead of just described.

The Import Wizard met a real manuscript

This is the one I'm less proud of, and I'd rather say so than let a demo hide it.

Understory's Import Wizard and Discovery scan, the machinery that reads an existing manuscript and finds your characters, locations, and stat blocks automatically, has real unit test coverage, but until this week nobody had run it against genuine, messy, real-shaped prose. So we did. And it found real problems: two structurally different stat-block schemas getting merged into one, a couple of entities showing up twice under slightly different names, a handful of non-person concepts (a faction name, a resource, a rank value) getting misfiled as characters.

Some of that's fixed in this build. Some of it isn't yet. Schema-grouping accuracy and entity deduplication are getting a real pass next, not papered over. If you bring an existing project into Understory today, spend a minute checking the Lexicon after import before you trust it blind. I'd rather tell you that than have you find out the hard way.

The rest of the list

A real pass of UI fixes came out of actually driving the app rather than just reading the code: Corkboard's naming finally settled (it briefly showed as "Pinboard" in a couple of places), empty projects get a real empty state instead of a blank void, and the in-app Report a Bug and Send Feedback flows work now, they were silently broken in every build before this one. Full list is in the release notes.

What didn't change

Same temporal world engine. Same entity database. Same Author Truth vs Reader Lens. Same event ledger. The core promise, the record open beside the prose while you write, is the same one alpha 1 made. Alpha 2 is about the app actually being trustworthy enough, under the name it's supposed to have, to make that promise to more people than the folks who found us early.

If you're new here, here's the studio and what it stands for, and here's the rename if you want the full story on the name. If you've been on alpha 1, the update is waiting for you.

-- Rob