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Defense Speech And Scene 8 Product Evidence Design

Purpose

The defense must be easy to say under time pressure and easy to understand for an audience that has not read the thesis. The current opening script introduces too many technical nouns before the demonstration gives them concrete meaning. Scene 8 also presents a prepared validation failure that does not reproduce in the current product.

This design separates two independently shippable changes:

  1. simplify the spoken path through Scenes 1-8; and
  2. replace Scene 8's sparse prepared visuals with compact product-result views based on reviewed wf output.

Speech Contract

Each beat has one audience goal, one to three anchor terms, and one suggested sentence. The anchor terms preserve the thesis vocabulary that identifies the beat; the sentence is rehearsal help, not a word-for-word obligation. The presenter may use optional notes during Q&A, but the timed path does not require lists of architecture terms.

The simplified story is:

  1. The title is the product ambition; the contribution is the platform below the agent.
  2. A chat/tool transcript can finish a task, but it is not a reusable workflow.
  3. Existing systems solve adjacent problems; this work does not replace them.
  4. A planner decides; the runtime executes; the Workflow API is their public boundary.
  5. A workflow moves through Draft, Artifact, Deployment, and Run.
  6. Clients enter through Workflow API; WorkflowServer composes records, capabilities, and execution.
  7. The demonstration is a prepared example, not a live autonomous planner.
  8. The example discovers capabilities, authors a draft, diagnoses a missing route, repairs it, saves an artifact, and creates a deployment.

Terms such as provider neutrality, Workflow API, Draft, Artifact, Deployment, Run, validation, and traces remain explicit anchor terms where they identify a slide's purpose. More detailed terms such as source resolution, explicit resume boundaries, and NodeUse remain available in visuals, optional notes, and Q&A. They are not mandatory opening narration.

The target for Scenes 1-8 is approximately four minutes, including navigation. The complete must-say path should remain comfortably below the previous 11-minute target so the presenter can pause and recover without rushing.

Reviewed Product Evidence

The prepared evidence remains deterministic. It does not call authoring RPCs while the presentation is running. Its data is hardcoded from a reviewed live CLI probe against:

uv run wf-rpc-server \
  --config examples/lda_report_workflow/wf.config.json \
  --host 127.0.0.1 \
  --port 8765

The reviewed invalid result was produced by removing the ok route from the analyze step and running:

uv run wf --url http://127.0.0.1:8765/rpc \
  draft validate presentation_diag_probe2

The relevant result is:

{
  "status": "invalid",
  "revision": 3,
  "diagnostics": [
    {
      "code": "missing_outcome_edge",
      "path": "nodes[analyze]",
      "message": "reachable node is missing edges for outcomes ['ok']",
      "details": {}
    }
  ]
}

wf explain missing_outcome_edge reports that the workflow cannot prove where execution goes next and recommends routing each missing outcome, using __end__ for terminal outcomes.

The reviewed repair is:

uv run wf --url http://127.0.0.1:8765/rpc \
  draft set-route lda_report_workflow \
  --revision 3 \
  --step analyze \
  --outcome ok \
  --to __end__

The follow-up validation result is status: valid, revision: 4, and diagnostics: [].

The disposable probe workspace was deleted after capture.

Scene 8 Visual Contract

Scene 8 remains a two-column prepared lifecycle surface with supporting chat on the left and one dominant product result on the right. It does not copy the full /console UI, but it uses the same evidence vocabulary: status, revision, method, command, records, diagnostics, and bindings.

  • Discover shows configured source IDs and one inspected capability contract.
  • Draft shows workspace identity, revision, status, step count, route count, and the two-step graph.
  • Diagnose shows an invalid status, diagnostic code, path, message, and compact explanation.
  • Repair shows the exact route mutation, why it fixes the graph, and the valid follow-up result.
  • Artifact shows immutable artifact ID, version, and required sources.
  • Deployment shows deployment ID, source bindings, and runnable status.

Diagnose and Repair are two views of one factual validation sequence. Diagnose does not reveal the successful result early. Repair retains enough diagnostic context to make the transition understandable.

Truth Boundaries

  • Do not label the prepared authoring sequence as live execution.
  • Do not claim that diagnostics automatically repair workflows.
  • Do not claim that a missing output projection invalidates this draft; it did not reproduce in the current product.
  • Do not expose the disposable probe workspace ID in the audience UI.
  • The broader root-config server is useful for product exploration but is not the evidence source for the deterministic report-workflow scene.

Verification

  • Presenter tests enforce one note per beat, the reduced word budget, and synchronization with the readable runbook.
  • Projection tests pin the reviewed diagnostic code, path, message, revision, exact public repair command, and valid follow-up state.
  • Component tests verify each phase's dominant product-result surface and the Diagnose-to-Repair information boundary.
  • Browser smoke covers all six Scene 8 beats at 1280x720, 1024x768, and 1920x1080, including internal chat scrolling and no document overflow.