The lineup fix and the new characters both land in main.py, so they share a
commit rather than being split artificially.
Lineup fix — populate_backgrounds() was reachable only through
POST /api/session/reset, so taking calls without hitting reset left
session.caller_backgrounds empty for a whole show. Every caller got a hollow
prompt, collapsed into generic relationship filler, and Silas lost his lore.
Now start_call populates on demand, get_caller_prompt raises
EmptyCallerBackgroundError instead of emitting an empty prompt, /api/callers
reports lineup readiness to a header badge, and cross-episode topic dedup
widened from 2 shows to 10.
Wellspring callers — Doyle as the anchor defector plus a six-member pool,
grouped by new frontmatter fields (group, group_lead, group_weight, register,
explicitness). A faction is capped at one caller per show, with a 15% roll for
two pairing the lead with one other member. group_weight lets an anchor carrying
an arc get slots faster than texture characters.
Also detects model refusals, which arrive as ordinary 200s and previously
reached air as broken-character text or dead silence.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Working-tree changes that had accumulated without being committed. The test
updates matter most: tests/test_caller_gen.py was left behind when caller_gen
started requiring voice and age in regulars_included, so the committed tree had
a failing suite that only passed locally.
- Caller dialog moves from Haiku 4.5 to Sonnet 4.6 (~$1/show to ~$3-4/show)
- Grok pinned to x-ai/grok-4.3; grok-4, grok-4-fast and grok-4.1-fast were
retired from OpenRouter, and llm.py swallows the 404 and returns empty text,
so a retired id makes callers go silent with nothing in the logs
- Devon's web_search now runs against SearXNG on the NAS
- Assorted TTS, audio, news, cost tracker and control-panel changes
- CLAUDE.md updated to match
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Previously _build_backgrounds ran two parallel Sonnet calls of 6
callers each, with zero cross-batch awareness. Each batch independently
gravitated to the same quirky archetypes (Coast to Coast weirdos,
specific hobbies) and produced clustered rosters — one recent show
had two BBQ competitors, two taxidermists, and two conspiracy-pattern
callers across 10 slots.
Collapses to a single Sonnet call generating all 10 at once so the
model can self-diversify across the full roster. The BATCH_SYSTEM_PROMPT
also gets an explicit ANTI-COLLISION RULE with concrete forbidden
examples (no two BBQ competitors, no two taxidermists, no two mystery-
signal callers, etc.) and an instruction to scan output for collisions
before finalizing.
max_tokens bumped 8000 -> 16000 to accommodate the larger response.
Wall-clock cost: ~30s -> ~60s, acceptable for the diversity gain.
Verified on a fresh reset: 10 fully differentiated callers, zero
archetype collisions.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
session.caller was reading name/voice from CALLER_BASES randomized defaults
instead of the slim bg dict — causing Silas to appear as "Earl" with wrong
voice. Now prefers bg data when populated.
Also: avatar endpoint infers gender from voice pool, /api/callers returns bg
name, regulars get canonical voice force-locked, batch gen splits into two
parallel calls with pre-warm so subsequent resets are instant.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
lukeandClaude Opus 5