TASK 4's ladder and TASK 33's worst-case table both quote numbers the code no longer
produces. Replaced with a dated note pointing at the current truth rather than
rewriting the decision records: the ladder is 12/10/6 with CBR, and the step-down floor
is the tier's YouTube minimum, not a flat 3.
Scope justification: Assets/starting-background.jpg is outside this unit — it is the
creator's replacement art, still awaiting their visual check.
Last slice. 590 green, 0 warnings.
- **Shed before you charge the viewer.** On machine evidence the policy's first act is
`ShedCaptureCadence`: `ScreenCaptureFrameSource` widens its conversion interval 10 ms → 33 ms (≈100
→ 30 conversions/s) through a new `ScreenCaptureManager.ShedLoad`. The output tier, the declared fps
and the viewer's picture are untouched — we stop paying for readbacks we were throwing away. It
costs no step budget; if the starvation persists, the fps ladder runs on the next clean window.
- The shed is reset on every stop path, so a cheap session cannot leave a later one capped.
- **The session line is a Logs-tab line, not a session-report line.** The session report is the money
summary (Super Chats, per currency); quality chatter there would bury the numbers it exists for. The
cause-tagged line already lands in the log at the moment of the step.
TASK 33 is complete: two ladders, budgets, floors, ambiguity, one-way with recovery behind a flag, the
relaunch, the copy, and the cost shed. 18 tests pin the ladders, the copy and the restart.
Design settled with the creator. Two findings drove it:
- **Resolution is not a bandwidth lever.** 1080p30 and 720p60 are both 6 Mbps in the shipped table,
so "step down to 720p" relieves nothing against congestion; and 60→30 at the same bitrate relieves
nothing either. Congestion therefore steps **bitrate only** (8.0 → 6.4 → 5.1 → 4.1, ~20%), which is
what OBS Dynamic Bitrate does — cited, adopted, with its climb-back discarded for v1.
- **The other half has no OBS equivalent**: machine starvation (the game and the app on one PC) steps
fps, then resolution, and sheds LlamaCasty's own capture cost *first*. That is the app taking
responsibility for a stream it is helping to starve.
Budgets as ruled: 3 steps for a 1080 start, 1 for 720 and vertical, hard floors at 720p30 /
Vertical 1080p30, hold-and-warn at the floor, never disconnect. Trigger ≥5% drops over 15 s twice,
30 s cooldown, ambiguous evidence does nothing.
New rule in `ui-surface.md`: a toast names the cause, the culprit and the remedy. Mechanism strings
("All pipe instances are busy", HTTP codes, exit codes) are log findings, never user-facing copy.
TASKS.md is now the index (status table, open items, research pointer).
33 files: 32 task files + 1 research facts file. The full take-saga
narrative and all design decisions are preserved verbatim; the catalog
makes the queue readable without opening every task body. Schema and
AGENTS.md updated to reflect the new layout.