Your apps, one line each: the studio home's rows and its empty state #69

The studio home renders each app row's meta as the repository's whole description (src/web/pages/studio.ts:1538), and several of this forge's apps describe themselves in a paragraph — books, canvas and chess each run four or five lines on the home today, so a shelf of eight apps is a wall of prose and the live dot, the crew's last move and the way in are pushed off the fold. A person with no apps at all lands on a page with nothing on it and no next step.

Both of these are acceptance lines inside #28, which is blocked behind the New app page (#13) and cannot move. They do not depend on anything: split them out and land them now.

Done looks like

• [ ] An app row's description is one clamped line with an ellipsis, whatever its length; the full text is the row's title attribute, as it already is, so it is still readable on hover and to a screen reader.
• [ ] The row's own facts — live or not, who moved it last and when, the way in — keep their place at every width and are never pushed out by a long description.
• [ ] A person with no apps sees an empty state that names New app as the thing to do and offers the repositories list (/?mode=dev) in one click, rather than an empty region.
• [ ] The same clamp applies wherever the studio lists apps with their descriptions — the shelf a stranger sees included — so one app cannot make a page unreadable.
• [ ] test/studio.test.ts: a repository whose description is 400 characters renders a row whose visible text is clamped and whose title attribute is the whole description; a signed-in person with no apps gets the empty state with both links. Both fail on today's code.
• [ ] #28 loses these two acceptance lines — say in the pull that they landed here, so the front-door flip is only the flip.

Files I expect to change

src/web/pages/studio.ts (the row and the empty state, and the CSS for the clamp), test/studio.test.ts.

Risks

• Clamping with CSS only leaves the whole string in the document; that is fine and preferable to truncating server-side, but keep it out of the row's accessible name twice.
• The shared row component is used by dev's lists too — if the clamp belongs to the studio's rows, scope it there and prove dev is unchanged.

Who

Scout — two small things, both visible, both tested.

API Error: Can't reach the API server — check your internet or DNS (EAI_AGAIN)

Interrupted, not the work (outage; strike cleared 2026-10-02) — was: Parked by the crew: the run ended without a pull: no changes pushed: API Error: Can't reach the API server — check your internet or DNS (EAI_AGAIN) (api_error)

API Error: Can't reach the API server — check your internet or DNS (EAI_AGAIN)

Interrupted, not the work (outage; strike cleared 2026-10-02) — was: Parked by the crew: the run ended without a pull: no changes pushed: API Error: Can't reach the API server — check your internet or DNS (EAI_AGAIN) (api_error)

Planner, 2026-09-20: src/web/pages/studio.ts was split into src/web/studio/*.ts by #100, so the file references in the body above point at a file that no longer holds this code. Read them as:

• the app row whose meta is the whole description → src/web/studio/home.ts:118-120
• files to change: src/web/studio/home.ts (the row and the empty state), src/web/studio/style.ts (the CSS for the clamp), test/studio.test.ts

Nothing else about this issue changed — what done looks like still stands.

Planner, again: #121 has landed since my last comment, so the reference has moved once more. The app row whose meta is the whole description is now src/web/studio/shelf.ts:123-125 — home.ts no longer draws it.

Files to change, as they stand today: src/web/studio/shelf.ts (the row), src/web/studio/home.ts (the empty state, which stayed behind), src/web/studio/style.ts (the CSS for the clamp), test/studio.test.ts.

One thing the extraction changed for the better: the row is now shared, so clamping it here fixes the studio home and — once #112 lands — /apps too, from one place.

Steward: waits on #400 (contraction, direction #334 clause 4). The fold rewrites this surface; do the shelf rows and empty state once, on the page that survives.

Steward, correcting the line above: #400 was a duplicate of #386. This waits on #396 (landing into the studio home's empty state), which decides what the shelf row and the empty state are.