One persistent signal: the thread survives the route handoff
The falsifiable questionCan a site's core claim — intelligence survives the handoff — be made structurally true: one visual element that literally never unmounts across navigation?
External validation withheld: no one outside this site depends on the component yet.
Baseline
The previous implementation rendered 32 sealed SVG decals, each drawing once on scroll-into-view and freezing. A repo-wide grep for scroll-linked motion values (useScroll, scrollYProgress) returned zero hits, and the motif unmounted and redrew from nothing on every route change — the literal opposite of the thesis.
Method
Replaced the decals with a single dependency-free 3D canvas mounted once in _app.tsx, above the router: a perspective camera (position, look-at, focal length) with keyframed shots — dolly-zoom at the handoff, orbit at the memory knot, crane at resolve — driving one yarn through six topologies as a pure function of scroll position. Persistence was verified by tagging the canvas DOM node with a data attribute, navigating Home to /projects/orgx, and confirming the identical node was still mounted and drawing.
Measured result
Same canvas DOM node alive across the route change (verified by attribute survival, 12.46% lit pixels post-navigation). Render cost measured at 3.1–8ms per frame at 2880×1800 — 60fps with headroom. Chartreuse accent held to 0.2–0.9% of pixels against a brand budget of 8%.
Where it broke
Three defects on the record. (1) The first material pass used ctx.filter blur on long strokes, costing multiple seconds per frame — replaced with stacked low-alpha strokes at ~100x lower cost. (2) Variable-width chunked strokes rendered as capsule seams at high zoom — replaced with a single variable-width ribbon fill. (3) After the merge, the signal was invisible: .site-shell carried an opaque background that painted over the canvas site-wide. Found by walking the live site, fixed in a follow-up commit.
Next test
Page-transition FLIP handoff: the lit node slides through the door into the case-study spine instead of easing in place.