The overhead lights in the hangar kicked on one row at a time, buzzing awake like runway strobes. Jester stepped in, coffee in hand, looking unusually serious — the kind of expression reserved for post-mission debriefs and IRS audits.

Viper was already at the workbench, arms folded, eyes locked on the laptop display.

“Morning,” Jester said.

“Depends,” Viper replied. “Did you bring good news or another smoking crater?”

Jester cracked a half-smile and set the mug down.
“Good news, boss. Test 3 didn’t just survive — it flew. Full refined-map execution. Two long legal paragraphs. Perfect diff. Zero drift.”

Viper blinked once. Slowly.
“Well I'll be damned. Walk me through it.”

Refined Map — Now with Atomic Execution

Jester tapped the screen and the diagram expanded.

“So here’s what we fixed. The refined map used to be… aspirational. Today it’s operational.”

1. Coarse pass:
   • Split the paragraph on spaces.
   • For each coarse chunk, grab the Word.Range — clean, bounded, and stable.
2. Refine with DMP’s regex:
   • /(\w+|[^\w\s]+|\s+)/g
   • This breaks each coarse chunk into true DMP-aligned tokens:
     • words,
     • punctuation clusters (...fox)"),
     • whitespace blocks.
3. Search refined tokens inside their coarse ranges:
   • Gives exact Word.Range handles for every token.
   • No scanning the whole paragraph. No substring collisions.

“Once we had that,” Jester said, “the rest was just discipline.”

Pass 1: collect delete ranges → queue → do not sync.
Pass 2: consume equal chunks → queue inserts → still no sync.
Only after both passes succeed:

• enable track changes
• commit deletions + insertions atomically
• context.sync() exactly once

“If anything goes wrong in Pass 2,” Jester added, “we throw before syncing. That way the document never sees a partial redline. Fail cleanly or don’t fly at all.”

Viper nodded, impressed.
“That’s not a fix. That’s doctrine.”

Line-Diff Fallback — Test 5 Takes Shape

Viper leaned over. “And the fallback?”

Jester swiped to the next diagram.

“Test 5 is now live. Line-diff mode. If the refined map can’t match a token — map lookup failure, corrupted range, whatever — we fall back to line granularity.”

Technical summary he rattled off:

• Split original and target paragraphs into lines (keeping \n).
• Run DMP’s internal diff_linesToWords, which creates stable line indices.
• Build a line map via paragraph.getTextRanges(["\n"], true).
• Delete whole lines in reverse order.
• Re-anchor based on surviving equal lines.
• Insert new lines using InsertLocation.after.

“Track Changes wraps the whole thing. Diff shows as clean per-line redlines. Perfect for clauses.”

Viper nodded.
“Not elegant. But reliable.”

Jester gestured at the last bullet point:
“Exactly. Bigger grain. But deterministic. No searching.”

Ejection Handle — Nuclear Full Paragraph Replace

“And fallback two?” Viper asked.

Jester tapped the final box.

“Full paragraph overwrite. The nuclear failsafe. If both word-map and line-diff abort — maybe Track Changes glitches, maybe Word’s internal range system has a mood swing — we wipe the paragraph and write the target text fresh.”

Viper raised a brow.
“Harsh.”

“Safe,” Jester corrected.
“Rarely triggered, but guaranteed correct.”

Task Pane Rebuild — Prototype 1 Resurrection

Viper closed the laptop lid halfway.

“And the task pane?”

Jester grinned.
“Pulled back the old Prototype 1 taskpane.js. Cleaned it up. Rewired buttons. Restored the architecture from ARCHITECTURE.md. The new Test 3 and Test 5 are ready to be plugged in. Tomorrow we wire them to actual LLM-reviewed text.”

Viper nodded approvingly.
“So we fly against real permutations next.”

“Yup,” Jester said. “Not just canned legal paragraphs. We'll feed it everything the model throws at us.”

Jester’s Quiet Admission

The adrenaline cooled. Jester leaned on the table, voice softer.

“You know, Viper… yesterday I kept championing the old search doctrines. Needle-search, chunk-search… the Top Gun ’86 moves. Flashy. Hot. Fun to fly.”

He shook his head.

“But today proved it again — searching isn’t just fragile, it’s fundamentally unstable. Multi-match collisions, substring ambiguity, stale cursors… Every time I pushed it back into the battlespace, it folded under pressure.”

He picked up his mug, staring into it.

“Yeah. The Mavericks were cool. But they’re museum pieces now. AMRAAMs rule the sky because they hit what you tell them to hit. Not what they guess you meant.”

Viper smiled — not a big smile, but the tight approving one instructors give when a pilot finally internalizes a lesson.

“Welcome to deterministic combat, son.”

The hum of the servers filled the hangar behind them — calm, steady, precise. The sound of tools built for the present.