Release 0.4.0: the Luminous Instrument redesign

[ASHR12]

Rebuilds the interface on flat surfaces and a real token system, which also eliminates the colour banding that dark UIs normally suffer from.

The banding fix

The faint contour lines across large dark areas were 8-bit quantization, not a rendering bug. sRGB spends very few code levels near black, so a soft gradient stretched across ~900px has fewer levels available than pixels to cross — it cannot render as a gradient at all, and becomes a few wide plateaus with a hard 1-level edge between each.

It only showed in the dim states because the aurora and glow were dimmed there, leaving the undimmed near-flat base ramp as the only structure on screen. The deck background's --bg-1 → --bg-0 ramp spanned 2 levels of green over 860px.

Two changes fix it:

• Lift the palette off near-black (#030509 → #0b111c). Below the sRGB toe, brightness is proportional to code value, so one step at value 7 is a ~14% jump while at value 21 it is ~5% and stops reading as a line.
• Replace every window-sized wash with a flat fill — the six-wash drifting aurora, the full-window vignette, and the deck and boot gradients.

Also in this release

• Depth from tone, not outlines. Nested 1px borders are gone from panels, bubbles, and cards; surfaces nest by fill tone plus spacing. Edges are kept only for floating menus.
• Tokens retuned into type, space, radius, and elevation scales, with the reactive accent now tracking orb state.
• Light only exists while the reactor runs. The canvas halo had a fixed alpha floor, so a sleeping orb emitted a glow disc wider than its drawn ring that the asleep filter turned into a grey smudge. Now gated on energy above rest, with stops rebalanced so the awake look is unchanged.
• Dropped the radial scrim and orb plinths — soft washes standing in for depth that read as shadow on a flat surface.
• View → Toggle Full Screen → Toggle Glass HUD. The old item was a no-op on this frameless window; the HUD now has a menu-bar exit.

Documentation

The banding analysis is written up in full in the README under "Dark UI without colour banding" — the problem is general to dark interfaces, so the five rules transfer to any project. A Cursor rule scoped to src/styles enforces them going forward.

Test plan

• npm run verify exits 0 — 49/49 tests, tsc --noEmit clean, Vite build clean
• Version badge auto-derives from package.json, bundle confirmed emitting build 0.4.0
• Lockfile synced, no dependency churn
• CI green on this PR
• Tag v0.4.0 after merge

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