Kind of page: explanation.
The coder reads one community's week of talk about r/place and codes
it. It writes codes in the participants' words, themes that group them
by what these people were doing (Gioia's first-order concepts, though
the files call them second_order; see for reviewers), and a within-case
account, and it sees no other community while it works. This page
describes the coder instrument (v32) from the top down: what governs it,
what one room holds, the tools, the fleet and the case lead, and the
yard that runs every room. How it was
built tells why each level exists; the file index lists every page.
One contract holds the method, and every role reads it first: the coder contract, with the Gioia two-level coding, the setting, the rules, the five steps and the outputs. The other contracts exist because the roles differ. A room too big for one reader needs a case lead to own the account and fleet coders to read its slices; the week before the canvas needs a brief writer; and the whole yard needs a scheduler to run the agents. Each role file says only what differs from the main contract and wins on that. AGENT.md is the short page of operating notes that sits beside them, the case-lead prompt adds a calibration block to the lead's first message, and the changelog records what moved between versions and why.
The source files are in the v32 instrument folder.
Everything needed to code a community sits in its own folder, so a room runs on any machine with Python and can be rebuilt or forked on its own. ROOM.md is its front page: the numbers and the commands in order. STATE.json is its memory, rewritten from the files and extended by the scheduler. The record files are the 97-hour cut (the 73 hours the canvas was open, plus the day after) and the seven days before, counted before any agent arrives. The brief's folder holds the brief writer's work, and the run folder holds the coder's. What a coder reads and cites is described under the corpus files; what it hands on is the package: the codes, themes, thread dispositions and pointers, the case and the notes. Once a room is verified, its inputs are packed into materials.tar.zst, its whole run into run.tar.zst, and the receipts of how it was prompted and checked into validation/.
Tools exist because handing an agent the material and asking for codes did not work: it spent its turns writing parsers and serialisers, and its account of its own reading could not be checked. Each tool takes one job away from the agent and leaves a record.
Around them sit the builders: newrun.py and newbrief.py lay out a directory, render_corpus_v32.py and cut_window_v32.py turn the raw record into what a coder reads. TOOLS-SPEC.md says what these tools share with the brief writer's and the aggregator's.
A room of more than 500 items does not fit one reader. The case lead reads the openings file to see the week's shape, decides the branch once, and in branch B cuts the room into slices of whole threads. tools/fleet.py builds one batch folder per slice, in order, and the yard's codex_coder.py runs one coder in each; each coder works in a fleet batch and passes a timeline and a lexicon to the next. When the last batch is collected, the lead builds the forest with tools/tree_builder.py, passes the gate in tools/audit_fleet.py, groups every first-order code into the room's second-order themes, and writes the account. How the lead and its coders remember across calls is told in the coder lead's memory page.
The yard is one folder per census room plus a scheduler that runs them, smallest first. The scheduler follows its contract: launch an agent, check what it wrote, record the result, and ask J, the principal investigator, only what is his. room.py drives one room from outside without calling a model, and coding_queue.py launches rooms in order, a set number at once. The case lead is the one agent saved whole: start_yard_lead.py runs its first turn, codex_lead.py checkpoints it after every reply as CHECKPOINTS.md describes, and lead_archive.py packs the finished store into the lead session archive. The yard's own README is at ../coder/README.md.