The box is now both server and player, so its screen has to be one or the
other at any moment. Three states, and the transitions are the point:
installing / down / failed diagnostics, so the fault is visible
up, but no account yet diagnostics plus the address to create one
up, and an account exists the player, full screen
A fresh install has nothing to play and nobody to play it for, so it stays on
the configuration screen until someone has signed up. Hiding that address
would leave the device unsetuppable: it has no keyboard.
⚠️ THE PLAYER IS AN IFRAME LAYER, NOT A NAVIGATION. Setting location.href
would replace the document and take the poller with it - and that poller is
the only thing able to notice the server failing later. As a layer, the
diagnostics are one style change away from being back on screen, which is
exactly what should happen when a server that has been playing for weeks
throws at 3am. A test asserts location.href is never assigned, so this cannot
be quietly simplified back.
Whether an account exists is asked by the wrapper, not the page:
/api/auth/config is public, but the page is loaded from file:// - origin
"null" - and the server sets no CORS headers on its own API, while this
process is already talking to it. The answer is three-valued. null means the
probe has not replied yet and is deliberately NOT treated as false: guessing
would flip a fresh box to an empty player and take the sign-up address off
the screen while someone was reading it.
Verified against a real server rather than by inspection - install, sign up,
watch it flip:
BEFORE signup : needsSetup=null -> diagnostics
POST /api/auth/register -> HTTP 201
AFTER signup : needsSetup=false -> player
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_014kfhrUPit5MCqxeTQyqr56
Co-authored-by: Dan Walters <dan.walters@bytetinker.net>
Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
