FIRST-LIGHT and ONBOARD: the page is served, not piped

[rdryfoos]

Three commits, two files, prose only. /bang serves FIRST-LIGHT as a rendered page with copy controls (dryfoos-sites #11), so the sentences that were true only of a reader inside less are no longer true of the page.

Do not merge yet. See The blocker below: this is waiting on the sites room, not on review.

What changed

ONBOARD.md, the companion aside: links https://specassay.com/bang instead of telling the reader to pipe it into a pager. The <!-- site:divider --> marker and the blockquote are untouched.

FIRST-LIGHT.md, five passages:

Was	Is
"you have already done the two things some pages start with"	the page is the instructions, the terminal beside it is where blocks go, nothing installed yet
"q leaves the page and gives you your prompt back"	gone; there is no pager to leave
"Open a second window now", one window each	"Open a terminal window now", with Spotlight and Command-N both named
"not in a terminal yet?" plus curl … | less	gone; the reader is on the page
"happens in the terminal window in front of you"	"is pasted into the terminal window beside it"

Kept deliberately: the space bar and down arrow clause, because both still scroll a browser, and "you never have to leave the instructions to run something", because that benefit survives the move. Rik's words stay wherever they still hold.

No pipe into a pager is left anywhere in FIRST-LIGHT.md (grep -c 'less' returns 0). That mattered: since /bang became HTML, the block this PR deletes would have told a stranger to pipe markup into less, inside the very page it was describing.

The gap that opened mid-PR, and closed

Deleting the "arrived some other way" block took the Spotlight instructions with it, so after the second commit a reader with no terminal was told to open one and given no way to do it: Command-N needs Terminal already running. Flagged rather than guessed at, because it needed a new sentence rather than a deletion and this page's instructional prose is Rik's.

Ruled and landed in 6b1dd9c: the paragraph now carries Spotlight for a reader starting from nothing, Command-N for a reader who already has Terminal open, and the reason to keep it beside the page. The route out of the deleted block is back, in the paragraph that asks for the terminal rather than in a footnote for people who arrived by another door.

The blocker, which is not in this repository

Merging this will red the next sites deploy until that room acts. tools/t-quickstart-asides.py:198 still requires the literal string FIRST-LIGHT inside the aside following the marked heading, and this PR removes that string from the aside.

Measured by importing the real functions from dryfoos-sites at 849a9c7 and running them against both versions of ONBOARD.md:

	t-quickstart-asides.py:198	warn_companion_pager
main today	PASS	fires
this branch	FAIL	silent

The main column is the control. Without it this would be a reading that cannot come back negative, which is PROMOTION-CONTRACT.md rule 12.

Both halves of that table are the same fact from opposite sides. The prose change clears warn_companion_pager, which that room added on 2026-09-21 and wrote to clear itself the moment this prose changed. It trips line 198, which is the last thing in that build still anchored on this room's sentence rather than on the marker, the anchor their own #9 replaced it with for exactly this reason. Keying it off the marker is theirs to do, and is being done now; this PR merges after that lands. Writing FIRST-LIGHT back into the prose to satisfy it would be putting a parser's limitation on the author.

I did not measure the /FIRST-LIGHT → /bang 308 myself: specassay.com is blocked from this session and a failed curl would look identical either way. That redirect is quoted from sites/specassay/onboard.py, not asserted.

Verification

At 6b1dd9c, locally:

137 passed                                     tests/ + extensions/specassay-check/tests/
doc-versions: OK (10 warning(s))               0 refusals
SpecAssay Check (Gate 2): OK (71 registry IDs) gate.ok=True

No em dashes added. No version numbers added. The new paragraph was wrapped to this file's 99 columns by a wrap asserted to change line breaks and nothing else.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

https://claude.ai/code/session_01Vzf6Sh5RVMKdFqaXKFF2FY

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