Detect modals, drawers and soft navigation as region-of-interest states

CHANGELOG.md

@@ -1,9 +1,91 @@
 # Changelog
 
+## 2026-08-30
+
+### Changes
+
+- State Manager: An open panel now stays part of the state until it actually closes. Detection used
+  to fire only on the single action that opened a drawer — one step later the agent forgot the
+  drawer existed, so its scope hints, the Pilot's state line and the panel's own experience file
+  never materialised. The panel is now re-checked on every action and carried forward while its
+  content is still on top; when it closes, the state moves back and the transition is recorded.
+- State Manager: A panel that opens inside another open panel no longer erases the outer one. When
+  the inner panel closes, the outer drawer is checked and restored as the active area.
+- Action: Drawers that open together with a URL change are now detected. A side panel that updates
+  the address bar used to be indistinguishable from real navigation; it now counts as a panel as
+  long as most of the previous page is still there underneath.
+- Action: A change that replaces most of the page is treated as a new page, not a panel. Content
+  finishing to load, or a page redrawing after a dialog closes, no longer gets reported as an
+  opened drawer — and scattered small changes across the page never count as one either.
+- Action: Panel scope selectors are always meaningful now — an id or a real CSS class, found by
+  walking past anonymous wrapper elements and utility classes into the panel itself. A positional
+  path like `//body/div[10]` or a container that spans the whole page is never suggested as a
+  scope; when nothing meaningful exists, the scope is simply omitted.
+- Action: A newly opened panel is named by the heading that just appeared, not by the title of the
+  page or panel behind it.
+- Action: Dialogs recognised by their accessibility role now also get a scope selector, so the
+  "scope your locators here" hint works for them too.
+- Action: When a batch of commands fails midway, the page state is still captured — a drawer opened
+  by the second command no longer goes unnoticed because the third command failed — and the report
+  now correctly shows which commands succeeded before the failure instead of marking all of them
+  failed.
+- [Pilot] Reviews progress immediately when a panel opens or closes, instead of staying silent for
+  the whole life of a drawer between scheduled check-ins.
+- Action: Smaller side panels are recognised now — a split-pane form of a few thousand characters
+  used to fall under the size floor and go undetected while the agent worked inside it blind. The
+  floor is 5K of cleaned panel content, still well above dropdowns and toasts.
+- Action: A large redraw with no identity is no longer reported as a panel. A list that re-renders
+  its rows has no new heading and no meaningful container, so announcing it as an unnamed region
+  only added noise; a panel must bring either a name or a scope selector to count.
+- Action: A dialog is found even when the app redraws half the page around it. Opening a modal used
+  to be missed entirely when it came with a burst of stray rendering — the burst won the "biggest
+  change" contest and cancelled detection. Every appeared area is considered now: oversized redraws
+  are set aside, the area bringing a new heading is preferred, and anything covered by another
+  element on screen is passed over — so the dialog itself gets the scope, like "Select suite for
+  test" in #modal-overlays.
+- Action: The element probed for visibility is the panel itself, not an invisible helper that
+  appeared with it — a transparent resize guard rendered next to a side panel used to make the
+  visibility check fail and silently drop the panel.
+
 ## 2026-08-29
 
 ### Changes
 
+- State Manager: Drawers, side panels and swapped-in subviews are now recognised as pages in their
+  own right. Until now only a modal that announced itself as a dialog counted as a state; a panel
+  built as a plain positioned element, or a wizard step that replaced half the screen without
+  changing the URL, was invisible — the agent kept aiming at the elements behind it, and a test that
+  opened and closed the same panel over and over looked like it was standing still. A large area
+  appearing on the page is now detected by comparing the page before and after the action and
+  measuring whether it covers what is behind it, so opening one is recorded as a move to a new state
+  and closing it as a move back.
+- Action: The result of a click that opens a panel now leads with the panel. A large change used to
+  be written off as a whole-page redraw and replaced with a placeholder saying how many characters
+  were dropped, which threw away the one thing worth reading. The result now names what opened and
+  where it lives, and carries that area's markup instead of the placeholder.
+- [Tester] Knows to keep working inside the area that just opened. For a panel that covers the page,
+  it is told the exact container to scope its locators to. For one that appears inline, it is told
+  the scenario most likely continues there while the rest of the page stays available — the stricter
+  "nothing outside is clickable" wording is reserved for areas actually measured as covering.
+- [Pilot] Tells a covering modal apart from an inline area. The state summary now shows the
+  container for a modal and a separate `region:` line for an area that appeared in place, so Pilot
+  can steer a stuck Tester into a subview instead of assuming a dialog is blocking it.
+- [Researcher] Describes drawers and subviews, not just dialogs. The extra pass that documents what
+  a modal contains now runs for any named area that opens, and its notes are still filed under the
+  page they belong to, so a panel that is open when a page is first analyzed no longer splits that
+  page's UI map in two.
+- Experience Tracker: Steps learned while a panel was open are now scoped to it. Experience files
+  written for such a state record the panel's container as `root:` in their frontmatter, and are
+  loaded only while a matching area is open — so panel-specific recipes stop being offered as advice
+  on the plain page. Existing files without the key behave exactly as before.
+- [Driller] Reads a nested popup or menu from what the click already reported instead of asking the
+  browser a second time.
+- Overlay detection is now one mechanism instead of three. The old path recognised overlays by
+  looking for class names containing words like "modal" or "drawer", which only ever worked on sites
+  that happened to name their CSS that way; it has been removed in favour of accessibility roles
+  plus the page-comparison and geometry check above. One consequence: an overlay already on screen
+  at the very first capture that carries no accessibility role is no longer detected until the next
+  action.
 - [Provider] Groq prompt cache hits are counted again. Groq reports how much of a prompt it served
   from cache, but the pinned `@ai-sdk/groq` build read that number out of the response and then
   dropped it, so every Groq request was recorded as a full-price miss and the cache hit rate showed

CLAUDE.md

@@ -137,7 +137,7 @@ All persisted formats share one rule: **envelope keys (YAML frontmatter, HTML co
 | Format | Location & owner | Envelope | Body grammar |
 |---|---|---|---|
 | Knowledge | `knowledge/*.md`, KnowledgeTracker | `url`/`path`, `wait`, `waitForElement`, `noExperienceReading/Writing` | Free prose facts |
-| Experience | `experience/<stateHash>.md`, ExperienceTracker | sparse frontmatter | `## FLOW:` / `## ACTION:` h2 blocks; bullets + ```js``` + `Solution:` line; h3 forbidden under blocks |
+| Experience | `experience/<stateHash>.md`, ExperienceTracker | sparse frontmatter: `url`, `title`, optional `root` (region scoping selector — record loads only while a matching region is open) | `## FLOW:` / `## ACTION:` h2 blocks; bullets + ```js``` + `Solution:` line; h3 forbidden under blocks |
 | Test plan | `output/plans/*.md`, test-plan-markdown.ts | `<!-- test ... -->` comment: `priority`, `style`; scenario heading, `url:` line, bullets as steps | Notes/results appended by runner |
 
 These are **data formats**: written and read back inside the runtime loop (knowledge/experience steer every run; plans are consumed by the runner and rerun).