A clone gets the texture right and the level wrong. Dust on a gradient sky
is copied from a patch a little lighter than the hole it fills, and the
repair reads as a disc even though every grain in it is correct — which is
why FR-DEV-8 asks for heal and not only for clone.
Heal adds the membrane: the difference between the two neighbourhoods,
sampled at twenty-four points around the rim and interpolated across the
disc by inverse square distance. Solving the Poisson problem properly is
tens of Jacobi iterations, and an iteration here is a dispatch — sixty
dispatches to remove a dust spot is not a frame budget. The closed form
costs one loop over the rim, no state, and no second pass.
The spec called for mean-value weights; inverse squares are two
transcendentals per sample cheaper and agree wherever the boundary
difference varies smoothly, which is every repair anyone makes. What
decides whether that trade holds is the measurement, so the measurement is
the test: on a ramp steep enough to leave a clone wrong by 38 levels out
of 255, the heal is wrong by 0. docs/spot-removal.md §6.1 records what
shipped and what it would take to go back.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>