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title: Render Experiment Lessons weight: 70

Render Experiment Lessons

June 2026 cleanup: xs / sextant/2x3 is the only new shipped render algorithm. The experimental sextant search aliases (xg, xb) and geomshape aliases (sh, shg, shb) were removed from code, CLI parsing, cycling, metrics, and tests.

A later pass also removed sg / spark/geom (the chooseGeomCandidates heuristic that switched between quad and sextant candidate sets per block). It added no quality over spark/best, which already scores the union of both candidate sets, so it was dead weight in the cycle. Its render_spark_geom_* / cli_spark_geom_* goldens were dropped with it.

Key rules retained from the failed experiments:

  • Every renderer must declare its terminal-cell source footprint and aspect correction in the shared pipeline.
  • Static and playback paths must fail with render aspect mismatch before ANSI output when the rendered viewport no longer matches the source aspect.
  • Opaque source regions must not emit terminal-default background holes.
  • Experimental aliases should not be public CLI modes until they pass the same aspect, gap, and golden-image invariants as shipped renderers.