Second half of the reported symptom: suggestions "show the same artists until
you request one". The ranking was `ORDER BY total_score DESC` with no
randomization and no seen-state, so the only things that could ever change the
deck were a candidate entering the library or the user filing a request. The
tail of the ranking was unreachable — requesting was literally the only lever.
No SQL change was needed. The query already takes a limit, so it over-fetches a
pool (4x the slots, capped at 60) and the selection moves to Go, where it is a
pure function of (pool, limit, day) — no DB, no clock — and therefore unit
testable in the fast lane instead of behind the integration gate.
Three rules. The best few by score always lead, so the strongest matches never
rotate out of sight (For You's head/tail shape). The remaining slots are drawn
by md5(mbid + day), the same daily-stable idiom the Home rows already use:
stable within a day so pull-to-refresh doesn't reshuffle, different tomorrow,
and no stored state. And a per-seed cap keeps roughly a quarter of the deck
attributable to any one seed artist, so twelve neighbours of a single artist
can't be the whole surface.
The cap is a preference, not a quota. A user whose pool hangs off one or two
seeds would otherwise get a three-card surface — worse than the monoculture
being avoided, and exactly the vanish-or-nothing shape rule #131 exists to
prevent — so a short deck tops up in score order from what the cap set aside.
This is also what keeps the existing Top12Cap integration test honest: its
30 candidates share one seed, and without the top-up it would return 3.
Eight unit tests, including one that had to be rewritten mid-change: the first
version asserted the cap against an evenly-spread pool, where the top-N is
already diverse and the assertion could not fail. It now uses a skewed pool
where one seed owns the entire top of the ranking, which is the only shape that
actually exercises a cap.
Dropped two //nolint:gosec directives added in passing — gosec isn't in
.golangci.yml, so they suppressed nothing and only implied a check that runs.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The Discover request surface was the one recommendation surface still on its
M5c implementation from early May. #796's taste profile, #1488's taste_unheard
bucket and #1490's folksonomy enrichment all modernized in-library surfaces;
this one was never in scope for any of them, so it still projected raw likes +
plays through artist_similarity_unmatched.
Two defects fall out of that signal, `5*liked + Σexp(-age/halflife)` summed
over every play of the artist.
It is unbounded, and contribution is signal × similarity — so a handful of
heavily-played artists monopolize all twelve slots, and their share GROWS the
more the user listens. The surface entrenched harder the better it knew you,
which is exactly backwards and matches the reported "goes stale once it has a
strong signal of your taste".
It also counted every play_event with no was_skipped filter, so skipping an
artist repeatedly INCREASED its signal and pushed more of its neighbours at the
user. ListMostPlayedTracksForUser and the taste engine both filter skips; this
query was the odd one out.
Seeds now come from taste_profile_artists.weight, which the taste engine has
already engagement-graded, time-decayed and signed — an artist the user drifted
away from stops contributing instead of accumulating forever, and can even
contribute negatively. Tiered per rule #131 rather than hard-switched: tier 1 is
the profile, tier 2 is likes + completed plays for a user who has no profile
rows yet (new account, or before the first daily recompute), so the surface
never empties. The old unfiltered-play signal is gone, not kept behind a toggle.
The signal is also log-damped, so one artist cannot take every slot even when
its weight dwarfs the rest.
$2 stays wired to the tier-2 decay: it is genuinely still used there, and
dropping the parameter would have changed the generated signature.
sqlc's image is not on this workstation and the change preserves the query
signature exactly — same three params, same seven columns — so only the
embedded SQL const moves. Both copies are edited and verified byte-identical
rather than pulling a container onto the operator's machine; a malformed query
fails the integration lane loudly, which is the real check either way.
Four integration tests cover what changed: a taste weight alone seeds with no
like or play; tier 2 does not run alongside tier 1; a non-positive weight never
seeds (guarded by a second positive row, so an empty tier 1 can't make it pass
for the wrong reason); and skip-only history seeds nothing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Add per-user artist-suggestion service ranking out-of-library MBIDs by
signal x similarity. Single-CTE SQL collects user likes (5x weight) and
recency-decayed plays, joins against artist_similarity_unmatched, and
filters in-library candidates plus non-terminal lidarr_requests. The
service resolves top-3 attribution seeds to artist names in a batched
GetArtistsByIDs call so the UI can render "because you liked X" reasons.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5