Session log — PageMotor 0.9 source of truth and Discovery AI pipeline

4 June 2026, evening · PageMotor · Hasmukh with Claude · auto-published from the local journal entry. A polished narrative version can be requested in any future Claude session.

Summary

In this session, run with Kenn, the latest PageMotor codebase was locked in as the canonical source of truth, a full local PHP and MySQL stack was installed on the Mac, and the whole Discovery AI pipeline was then built on top of it: an interview plugin that produces a Design Brief, the Marula School of Medicine demo site synthesised from that Brief, three ways to ship a finished site, two interactive lesson guides, and a design-diversity gate after Hasmukh flagged that the outputs were looking samey. Work began on the evening of 3 June and ran through 4 June, including migrating the canonical tree from 0.9 RC4 to the released v0.9, and the session was picked up once more on 8 June to restore the local servers. A relayed message from Chris Pearson, PageMotor's creator, set the keyed-arguments rule that shaped the plugin work. Catch-up note reconstructed on 12 June 2026 from the saved conversation.

Decisions

The "PageMotor 0.9 RC4" folder adopted as the canonical PageMotor source of truth, then re-based to the released v0.9 tree at "44 CLAUDE/PageMotor v0.9/" when Hasmukh asked for the update.
Keyed arrays are now the canonical shape for the skills() valet's arguments (per Chris Pearson's relayed note); the old unkeyed form is retired.
Local toolchain installed via Homebrew, with Hasmukh running the single password step himself.
Interview plugin shape: refined plain-chat UI, output is the Design Brief only, no embedded API key (the agent conducts each interview through a file relay, "drive it through me"), built on its own fresh instance.
Three shipping models: V1 Brief only, V2 a factory command that provisions and installs, V3 a single website.json file the owner imports themselves.
Design rule: keep the framework's principles constant but make every site's visual expression distinct; chosen action was "bake it into the system, then show the range".
The setup guide to live inside PageMotor as a themed page, and the default front end re-skinned via the medical-school-design framework to tell the build story.
The local-address binding gotcha, the seven-port map and the up/down scripts saved to project memory.

Changes made

Read the entire PageMotor 0.9 RC4 tree (roughly 8,200 lines of documentation, 44 plugins, 507 PHP files) and recorded it as source of truth in project memory.
Converted skills() arguments to keyed arrays in skill-design-conversion/plugin.php and skill-plugin-creation/plugin.php, and documented the keyed shape in pagemotor/lib/docs/plugin-valet-methods.md.
Installed the local stack: Homebrew 5.1.15, PHP 8.5.6 with mysqli, MySQL 9.6.0, Composer 2.10.0; all 507 PHP files lint clean.
Made the RC4 site runnable: config.php, a dedicated pagemotor MySQL user and database, dev-router.php plus serve.sh on port 8910, a one-line core fix declaring PM_MCP::$slug in pagemotor/lib/mcp.php, and an admin user created through PageMotor's own code path.
Built PageMotor-Setup-Guide.html (10 lessons, quizzes, progress tracking) and hosted it inside PageMotor as a themed page at /setup-guide/, with its body and guide.js under user-content/uploads/setup-guide/.
Re-skinned the Attention front end into the "build story" landing page through the medical-school-design framework; artefacts in medical-school-design/pagemotor-build-story/, with three new traps appended to that framework's failures.md.
Stood up a second RC4 instance, pm-medschool/ (database pagemotor_med, port 8911), and built the enhanced Discovery AI plugin: keyed skills(), a truth gate that never invents accreditation or statistics, warn-don't-block on niche anti-patterns, and the no-key agent relay; ran a full interview producing the Marula School of Medicine Design Brief.
Synthesised the Marula site from its Brief (theme plus home and six inner pages, with visible "TO CONFIRM" markers); artefacts in medical-school-design/marula/; packaged discovery-ai-plugin-v1.0.zip at the project root.
Migrated to the v0.9 release (./dev/pagemotor up, port 8080, database pagemotor_v09); the plugin ported with zero code changes, Marula was rebuilt there, and the source-of-truth memory was re-based.
Built PageMotor-Factory/ with the pm-factory command: one line provisions an isolated instance and installs a site bundle; proved with Marula on port 8920.
Built PageMotor-Export/ with export-site.php and pm-import.php: exported marula.website.json (45 KB) and imported it onto a bare instance on port 8921; also fixed a port-probe bug in pm-factory.
Built DiscoveryAI-Guide.html (12 lessons covering the whole build) and hosted it on a fresh factory instance on port 8922.
Baked in design diversity: medical-school-design/design-diversity.md, check-distinctiveness.php and fingerprint-ledger.json (the gate rejects look-alike designs), wired into the plugin's synthesis doc; design-range-lookbook.html shows three contrasting identities (Kova, Ashworth & Pike, Tindall Roasters), making five identities in the ledger.
Added up-all.sh and down-all.sh to the RC4 root; fixed the local-only binding in pm-factory and the v0.9 dev rig so all seven local servers answer on the standard local address; restored the executable bit iCloud had stripped from serve-medschool.sh and hardened up-all.sh against a repeat.
Created two offline single-file captures: DiscoveryAI-Guide-8922-standalone.html (48.8 KB) and Marula-Site-8921-standalone.html (34.9 KB, all seven pages with an in-file router), both verified to make no server requests.
On 8 June, restored the full seven-server stack after a reconnect event took it all down, and fixed up-all.sh's health check (it had been racing the servers' start-up and reporting false failures).

Follow-ups

The v0.9 admin on port 8080 has no stored login; the first visit prompts to create the first user.
The local servers do not survive reboots or reconnect events; run ./up-all.sh in the RC4 root to bring all seven back.
Two lessons were offered for memory but never confirmed: iCloud strips the executable bit from scripts in CloudDocs, and curl is not on the non-interactive shell's PATH.
Two verification entries (guide-standalone on port 8946, marula-standalone on port 8947) remain in .claude/launch.json and can be removed.
Wider PHP 8.5 dynamic-property notices across the codebase remain to be tidied for the 0.9 release (flagged to the creator).
The older DiscoveryAI-Guide.html and the newer 8922 standalone capture both exist at the RC4 root; decide which to keep.