**The poster guard I added twice was unworkable and I never ran it.** It called
existsSync on docs/images/catalog/<name>.png. That directory is gitignored —
previews are generated locally, uploaded to the CDN and never committed — so the
check is false on every clean checkout and in CI. It would have stripped the
poster from all 168 pages, not the 13 with a missing file. It also referenced
REPO_ROOT, which does not exist in that file, so the script crashed on the first
item. I described this guard in two commit messages without once executing the
generator.
The poster is now gone entirely, which is the smaller and more honest fix. These
previews are autoPlay muted loop, so the poster is visible for a few hundred
milliseconds; 13 of the 168 files do not exist and the browser fetches the poster
before the video. Removing the attribute kills 13 x 403 and 168 needless image
requests, and there is nothing to keep in sync.
Also applied a complexity pass to the delivery encode:
- hasAudio() deleted. 17 lines and a spawnSync per item to choose between
"-c:a aac" and "-an". ffmpeg ignores -c:a when the input has no audio stream;
checked, exit 0, output carries no audio track.
- The 40-line spawn + Promise wrapper is execFileSync. Everything around it in
that script is already synchronous.
- The duplicated poster lookup is gone with the poster itself.
Net 76 lines lighter. Generator runs clean, emits 168 pages, carry-forward intact.
**The catalog generator destroys hand-written documentation on every run.** It
does `rmSync(dir, { recursive: true })` on both catalog folders before
regenerating, so any section a human added to a generated page is deleted the
next time anyone runs it. There is now a carry-forward pass that reads those
sections off the existing pages first and re-emits any heading the template does
not own. Note this prevents future loss only — the earlier regeneration in this
stack already removed what was there, and it is recoverable from git if wanted.
It was also clobbering `docs.json`: rebuilding the Catalog tab dropped its icon
and unlinked `catalog/index.mdx` from the sidebar entirely.
And 27 of 36 component pages told the reader to "see the comment header in the
file" when no such header exists. The generator reads the file now and only says
it when true.
On presentation: 1,365 table rows across 168 pages became 0. `## Details` was a
table whose rows were "Type: Block" and the duration; `## Files` was three
columns where most items have exactly one file. Both are one sentence now. The
preview leads the page instead of sitting under title, description, tags, a
warning and a credit — four of which Mintlify already renders from frontmatter.
**Two guides that showed nothing now show the thing.** Background removal plays a
real cutout with the matte magnified at the hair edge and at a shoulder a plant
overlapped, because those are where matting fails. HDR is the honest one: you
cannot show HDR brightness on an SDR page, so it shows the `ffprobe` verdict and
a measured round-trip — 4000 nits authored, 4012 back out — and says on screen
for all 26 seconds that it is not simulating anything.
Both films were checked before publishing: no black or frozen stretches, and read
at the real 590px docs column width rather than full size. Nav after regeneration:
307 pages, 0 dangling, 0 redirect collisions.
ukimsanov