Living Nodes: how to share a real-time concept deck
A practical companion to our decision-graph note: what shipped, where to click, and what “public deck” means for collaborators.
If you read Spatial Decisions, Not a Render Queue, you already know why we care about threads of intent instead of flat image folders. This post is the shorter, practical sibling: what Living Nodes are today, exactly where to open them, and how they sit next to the Style Quiz decision graph without duplicating it.
What Living Nodes are
A Living Node is a small public workspace at gaia.computer/deck/… — one shared prompt, four nodes (we call them slides in the URL with ?slide=), and live sync so everyone sees the same text and active node. Guests do not need an account to read or remix within the limits we enforce in Firestore. When someone is ready to render for real, they continue in Studio Generate mode.
How to start one
- Visit gaia.computer/deck — you get redirected to a fresh id you can bookmark or paste into an email.
- Or open Studio in Generate mode and use the Living deck entry (floating bar or top bar) so the deck sits next to your renders.
- Edit the prompt; it autosaves on blur. Switch nodes to stage different beats of the same story.
- Use Visualize in new style to open the micro quiz; after sign-in, the style choice is written back to the deck.
- Use Copy link on the deck page to share the same URL including the active node query string.
Overlap with the Style Quiz and decision graph
The standalone Style Quiz now seeds a structured decision graph in Firestore (trees, nodes, variants) and can merge an anonymous session into your account after signup. Living Nodes reuse similar style vocabulary in the deck quiz, but they are not the same datastore: the graph is for durable preference and research; the deck is for lightweight, synchronous sharing. Same week of shipping, different job to be done.
Operators: deploy the rules
Guest read/write on public decks depends on the April 13 Firestore rules (anonymous create with isPublic only, plus remix field updates). If collaborators still see permission errors after you ship the frontend, run firebase deploy --only firestore:rules against the production project and retry in a fresh browser session.
What is next
We are iterating on deck chrome, export paths, and how resolutions on a deck flow into project context. If you are piloting with a studio, reply on any Gaia email—we read all of it.