PopChoice v0.2.0

Better Taste Control release.

Status: release candidate. Tracked by #826.

Release Goal

Make PopChoice feel more controllable by letting users describe what they want, what they want to avoid, and how safe or surprising the recommendation should be.

Highlights

• Explicit avoids and constraints in Fast Pick and Normal Match.
• Optional, lower-friction reference movie UX.
• Discovery appetite control for safe, balanced, and surprising picks in both Fast Pick and Normal Match.
• Result feedback loop v1: completed results now expose correction feedback signals plus "More like this" and "Try another" actions backed by the existing one-shot more-picks queue.
• Deterministic recommendation eval cases for the new taste-control signals: hard avoids, runtime limits, discovery appetite, optional reference movies, and feedback-derived memory.
• Product docs now describe the completed 0.2.0 behavior as the current product contract and keep future signal-model work separate.

Implementation Scope

• #827: explicit avoids and constraints.
• #828: optional reference movie.
• #829: discovery appetite.
• #830: result feedback loop v1.
• #831: deterministic eval coverage.
• #832: product docs and release notes.

Out Of Scope

• Taste Swipe MVP.
• Multi-device group rooms.
• A full canonical TasteSignal[] recommendation backend rewrite.

Verification Before Promotion

• Confirm every 0.2.0 implementation PR passed the normal PR gate: lint, type-check, build, server tests, deterministic recommendation evals, and relevant e2e/storybook coverage.

• Confirm npm run eval:recommendations passes with the 0.2.0 taste-control fixture set.

• Let the merged development branch deploy to the Coolify development resource, then verify:

  curl -fsS https://dev.pop-choice.shchilkin.dev/api/health | jq .
  curl -fsS https://dev.pop-choice.shchilkin.dev/api/build | jq .

  /api/build should report version: 0.2.0, channel: development, environment: development, and branch: development.

• Smoke-test development manually:

  • Fast Pick with at least one hard avoid.
  • Normal Match with an empty reference movie.
  • Safe, balanced, and surprise discovery appetite.
  • Completed-result feedback plus "More like this" or "Try another".

• Promote production only after development is accepted: merge development into main, run the Container Images workflow on main with deploy_environment=production, approve the GitHub production Environment, and wait for Coolify deploy verification.

• Verify production after promotion:

  curl -fsS https://pop-choice.shchilkin.dev/api/health | jq .
  curl -fsS https://pop-choice.shchilkin.dev/api/build | jq .

  /api/build should report version: 0.2.0, channel: production, environment: production, branch: main, and the expected release commit or image tag.

• Do not set APP_VERSION in Coolify project, environment, resource, or preview variables. The deployed image should provide the package version.

Full Changelog

https://github.com/shchilkin/PopChoice/compare/v0.1.0...v0.2.0