μ-text

A narrative troubleshooting simulator. You are an entry-level engineer in the Troubleshooting Department, reconstructing AI-generated software failures after they have already reached customers. Each incident is a deduction grid and a story, and the incidents are not as unrelated as they look.

Play it: https://dhilst.github.io/mutext/

Sixteen chapters, starting with the interview. Deadlocks, race conditions, starvation, split brain, and worse. No account, no backend, nothing to install.

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Running it locally

Jekyll runs from the vendored bundle path and Tailwind from the local npm dependency:

npm run serve        # http://127.0.0.1:4000/

npm run build is for the GitHub Pages deploy only — it writes production paths into _site/ and will break a running dev server. Restart serve instead if you need to rebuild Tailwind.

Verifying the puzzles

Every puzzle is verified offline by a Z3 solver before it ships. A puzzle passes only when it has exactly one solution, that solution is the declared answer, every clue is load-bearing, and the page the player reads agrees with the model the solver checked.

npm run check        # what CI runs

That is three things:

Command	Checks
npm run check:puzzles	solvable, unique, correct — and no vacuous, duplicate or removable clue
npm run check:continuity	the evidence ledger, the chapter link chain, no meta-language in player-facing prose
npm run test:puzzles	the checker's own test suite

Both CI workflows run all three, so a puzzle with a dead clue or a chapter that breaks the evidence chain cannot reach the site.

Authoring a new puzzle starts from the intended solution:

cd checker
uv run make_puzzle.py specs/017-something.yaml --prefer-direct 0.2

It returns a minimal sufficient clue set — no clue you could delete without making the puzzle ambiguous.

Layout

_posts/            one chapter per file, each paired with a checker input
_lore/             free-standing in-world artifacts
_data/evidence.yml strings more than one chapter has to agree on
_includes/         the grid, panels, terminal windows, evidence cards
checker/           the offline solver and linters (never shipped to the site)
docs/              specs and design notes (excluded from the build)

docs/puzzle-spec.md covers the grid and the authoring order, docs/sat-checker.md the clue grammar and the quality rules. Both checker/ and docs/ are excluded from the build, because they contain answers.

Note

docs/ contains the full design notes for all sixteen chapters, including solutions and the story outline. It is worth not reading before playing.