Home / Reports / 2026-08-16

Experience lens dogfood — fizzy (Hotwire/Rails, second app)

Date: 2026-08-16
Context: review (experience lens only)
Scope: fizzy — a large, independently-authored Hotwire/Rails Kanban app (341 ERB views, 63 Stimulus controllers). Three read-only lens passes: boards/cards, forms/destructive/auth, and lists/notifications.
Intent: Second calibration of the experience lens. The cards were hardened against a first app (ongela, 2026-08-14); this run tests whether the tightened cards still over-fire on a different author's conventions and scale, and what new interaction patterns a bigger app exposes. Part of issue #23.
Config: plugin defaults.
Product code: not edited. fizzy is third-party OSS; findings are advisory to its owner and are not filed.

Why a second app

ongela earned the first five guards. fizzy is the same stack but a different codebase: drag-and-drop boards, inline card edit, real-time notification broadcasts, magic-link auth, and a much larger Stimulus surface. It confirms the ongela guards held and, more importantly, exposes patterns ongela did not have — which is where the new cards come from.

Confirmed findings (real, in fizzy)

Reported to fizzy’s owner; not part of this PR.

#	File	Issue	Smell	Conf
1	`app/controllers/signups_controller.rb:19`	Invalid signup replies `head :unprocessable_entity` on a `turbo: false` form — the browser lands on a blank dead-end page	error state / dead-end	100
2	`app/controllers/join_codes_controller.rb:37`	Same bodyless-`head` pattern blanks the join-by-code screen	error state / dead-end	100
3	`app/controllers/users/joins_controller.rb:10`	Onboarding uses `update!`; a whitespace-only name passes HTML5 `required` but fails the model, raising an unhandled 500 (a sibling action handles it)	error state	100
4	`app/models/notification.rb:25`	Real-time notification broadcasts prepend to regions with no `aria-live`; screen-reader users get no signal	live region / announce	100
5	`app/views/my/access_tokens/_access_token.html.erb:10`	Revoke button’s screen-reader name says “Edit”; the accessible name lies about a destructive action	name/action mismatch	100
6	`app/views/tags/index.html.erb:3`	“All tags” list has no empty state	empty state	100
7	`app/views/my/pins/index.html.erb:12`	`/my/pins` full-page route has no empty state (the tray toggle guards, the route does not)	empty state	100
8	`app/views/events/event/attachments/_attachment.html.erb:6`	Attachment/remote images have no `alt` at all	a11y name	100
9	`app/views/cards/steps/edit.html.erb:13`	Step delete has no confirm while every sibling destroy does	destructive / inconsistency	75
10	`app/views/reactions/_reaction.html.erb:14`	`role="button"` hardcoded for all reactions, but operability is added by JS only for the author	role vs behavior drift	75
11	`app/views/cards/container/_content.html.erb:11`	Draft-card autosave ignores its response by design (cannot observe a failure), and its navigate-away submit is not awaited, so a fast navigation can still drop the last edit. A prior merged PR already fixed the earlier 406 / in-flight keystroke loss (see PR-history below); this is the residual design gap	autosave / no failure signal	75
12	`app/views/sessions/magic_links/show.html.erb:11`	Magic-link code entry has no visible submit button (Enter/paste only)	implicit-submit-only	75

False positives / where the hardened cards still over-fired → the fold-back

Every row below is a place the already-tightened cards mis-fired on fizzy. Each is now guarded.

Over-fire on fizzy	Why it was wrong	Card change
Drag/drop reorder flagged as “no keyboard alternative”	The keyboard path is a `role="radiogroup"` of buttons three navigation hops away, in a different controller/route	New drag/gesture bullet: check cross-surface equivalence (same mutation via another route/view), not just the same file
Empty-state copy “Drag cards here” flagged for naming only the drag modality	A persistent global “Add a card” button is on the same screen	Cross-surface & affordance guard: a visible global affordance caps the finding to advisory (confidence 50 / P3), reportable not suppressed — and it does not excuse a genuinely missing empty-state message
`role="radio"` on individually-tabbable buttons flagged as broken	Each option is a real, Tab-and-Enter-operable `<button>`; only the announced pattern differs	Toggle bullet: do not flag many tab stops in `role=radio` unless arrow-key nav is advertised or operability breaks
Icon-only buttons using `title:` flagged as unnamed	`title` is a valid accessible name; fizzy leans on it	Icon-only bullet: `title` added to the accepted-name list
Reversible unsave/unpin toggles flagged as “destructive without confirm”	A one-click toggle whose inverse renders right back is not data loss	Destructive bullet: second exemption for pure reversible state toggles
Mobile unread red dot flagged as color-only signal	The signal is the dot’s presence/absence (shape), not its hue	Handled by the “color must be the only differentiator” reading; not flagged

New smells added (fizzy earned these)

Patterns ongela did not have, now named in the cards:

Bodyless error dead-end — head :4xx with no render/redirect_to ... alert: on a form path (findings 1, 2).
Live-updating region with no aria-live — a broadcast/turbo_stream target replaced with no announced ancestor (finding 4).
Accessible name that contradicts the action — an sr-only/label verb disagreeing with the real effect (finding 5).
Role set in markup, operability added conditionally by JS — role/behavior drift between server and client render (finding 10).
Fire-and-forget autosave that cannot observe failure by design — needs an alternate failure signal (finding 11).
Implicit-submit-only control — only a key/paste submit path, no button (finding 12).
Cross-surface & affordance guard in the confidence anchors — check other routes/views before scoring a missing keyboard path or thin empty state.

Coverage

Reviewed: boards, cards, columns, reactions, tags, account, users, sessions, signups, join_codes, filters, prompts, client_configurations, my, activities, notifications, events, event_summaries, searches, bar, entropy, plus the Stimulus controllers, controllers, and models needed to confirm each finding. Read-only.

Held from ongela (no change): the sibling-consistency, framework-default, and error-tier guards all behaved correctly on fizzy — no regression, and they caught real inconsistencies (steps delete, the onboarding 500).

PR-history learnings

Beyond reading the current code, I mined fizzy’s own merged PR history (the ie-from-pr-learnings idea: enforce what human reviewers already fought for). Two findings changed the cards:

A merged PR fixed drafted-card autosave so it persists via JSON and stops dropping keystrokes typed while a save is in flight (the earlier code POSTed with a default Accept: text/html to a turbo_stream/json-only action, getting a silent 406 — edits never persisted). This validates the new “autosave that cannot observe failure by design” smell and sharpened it: the card now names the two real failure modes (wrong request format answered by a silent 406, and in-flight keystroke loss), not just “no spinner”.
A merged PR deliberately removed input autofocus from the mobile jump menu. That is the signal that moving focus in on open is a modal expectation, not a blanket one. The focus bullet now carves out non-modal drawers/menus that intentionally do not autofocus, so the lens will not flag a deliberate choice.

Reverts in the history (e.g. a “Go to board” button in the card perma view, a filter-clear navigation change) confirm the team treats these interaction details as contested design decisions — the kind of context that keeps the lens from flagging intentional choices as defects.

Verdict

Second fold-back complete. The tightened cards held on an independent, larger Hotwire app, and fizzy earned six new named smells plus a cross-surface guard. Two real apps, same dogfood loop the architecture packs used — the experience half is now calibrated, not just principled.

Source: docs/intent-engineering/2026-08-16-experience-dogfood-fizzy.md