Model decision — docade/glyph

DECIDED — recraft-v41-svg. Justin, 2026-08-20, after the sheet and the file contents. $0.08/image, true SVG export, one path and one fill.

The reason, which is not "it looked best": this lane's contract is ART-BRIEF.md status-icons — "Single-color so both surface themes can tint them" — and the app already consumes it that way ({ icon, text, tone: 'var(--color-success)' }). So the test that decides the race is not the picture, it is whether the emitted SVG can be one themeable colour. Opening the files answers it in a way an 80px sheet cannot:

recraft-v4-svg is disqualified twice: it shipped an opaque background box on every piece (visible on the sheet — white-on-white for affordable, ios-share and tab-prizes), and gradients plus four fills cannot become one tintable colour. V4 → V4.1 is a real transparency and structure upgrade, and that is worth knowing beyond this lane.

recraft-v41-svg-pro lost at 3.75× the price: 25 paths, two fills, no advantage at 80px. The vendor positions it for posters and complex brand assets, which is the opposite end of the size range from a 24px glyph. Written down so it is not re-proposed.

authored-svg is the runner-up and it is genuinely close — cheaper ($0.018), smaller (484 bytes), a native 24×24 viewBox drawn on the pixel grid it is judged on, and it emits role="img" with a <title>. It produced Apple's actual share glyph where the Recrafts produced a generic upload arrow, which matters because ios-share carries a hard override: mimic Apple's icon, house style loses to recognisability. It stays the answer for any piece whose text or exact form must be correct.

What this decision costs, stated: across 65 pieces, recraft-v41-svg is ~$5.20 and ~390KB against authored's ~$1.18 and ~31KB. That is a real payload difference in a PWA on a child's phone, and it is the thing to re-examine if the lane ever feels heavy.

Carried into the style contract — not optional

Nothing in this race emitted currentColor. V4.1 emits a single rgb(194,100,223) fill; authored emits a single #f5f3ff. Single-colour is the hard part and V4.1 has it — the notation is a normalize step. docade-glyph@1 must require currentColor (or one declared fill that normalize rewrites), or the tinting contract fails at integration rather than at review.

The 2048×2048 viewBox is the known risk of this pick. V4.1 draws at 85× the delivered size and downscales. It survives at 80px; it has not been judged at 24. Judge the first production batch at 24, not at 80.

Family coherence is the actual requirement — 65 icons read as one system or they are 65 drawings. Their manifest already names one live collision: rejected must be visually distinct from reversed, "they share a glyph today and mean opposite things."

This is the field phase of docs/15-LANE-WORKFLOW.md, and the lane stays blocked on it until a person writes a decision here. That is deliberate: the model a lane uses is upstream of its style contract, its cost per piece and every verdict that follows, and it is the one choice a sheet can settle in an hour and a wrong guess can cost for a year.

Write the reason, not just the winner. The winner ages out with the next model release; the reason is what tells the next lane what to test for.

Race — 2026-08-20 · sample-6

Sheet: /Users/alphalobo/Projects/wootbuild/clients/docade/bakeoff-glyph-sample-6.png — rows are pieces, columns are models, at 80px. Every model got the same plate, the same exemplars and the same compiled prompt.

Re-render this sheet for free: art bakeoff docade/glyph/sample-6 --runs r-20260820-9c36,r-20260820-cf70,r-20260820-8563,r-20260820-cf88