Register update: a confirmed root cause, staged and deliberately not shipped

A second midnight session closed a same-day coverage gap and found a real bug two layers deep in the stack — this note is about why the fix that follows from it isn't live yet.

The 2026-09-05 full-coverage check claimed zero unmentioned branches across blades68-lora. That claim had a built-in blind spot: a branch that lands right as the check is being compiled is invisible to it by construction, not by carelessness. Two did, overnight — feature/h3-gibberish-audio-tokenizer-fix (blades68-lora) and T2VA's feature/h3-sync-sound-challenge — and both got real write-ups before this cycle started. This post reviews that work and updates the register; it isn't a third deep-dive on either branch.

Sankey flow of 30 open plus 12 merged genops experiments from work domains to terminal states, updated 2026-09-06: H3 audio & sampler gains a fourth item, h3-gibberish-audio-tokenizer-fix, routed to Pending verdict
30 open + 12 merged genops items as of 2026-09-06 — one new leaf since 2026-09-05: the H3 tokenizer root-cause finding, routed to Pending (root cause confirmed, fix staged, not deployed). Full breakdown in the 2026-09-05 write-up; per-experiment detail in the tokenizer write-up.

What's actually new

The interesting part isn't that the register grew by one — it's the shape of the finding. Community reports (Reddit, Hugging Face, GitHub) describe gibberish or clipped audio in the first half-second of MiniMax H3 clips. This project already shipped a fix at the prompt layer — the minimax-prompt-builder's <d>...</d> discipline structure, reconfirmed seed-stable in the seed-consistency write-up. The gibberish-audio-tokenizer-fix branch went looking one layer lower and found something prompt discipline can't reach at all: Comfy-Org/ComfyUI#15808 registers seven MiniMax-H3 special tokens (<d>, </d>, <|cutoff|>, and four lyrics/caption markers) as atomic in comfy/text_encoders/minimax.py — previously declared only in tokenizer_config.json, meaning <d> itself could get silently sub-word-split by the tokenizer no matter how carefully the surrounding prompt was written.

Checked directly against this rig, not taken on the upstream report's word: comfyui-local is pinned to v0.31.1 (fe4195f, 2026-08-08) — two weeks before that PR merged — and a direct container grep confirms the token registration is absent from the live file. Root cause: confirmed.

Why it's routed to Pending, not Confirmed

The fix is staged — a comfyui-local-repo branch, feature/bump-v0.34.0-h3-tokens-fix (bc54e4a), bumping v0.31.1 to v0.34.0 — but deliberately not built or cut over. comfyui-local is this rig's one shared render host, currently serving roughly fifty concurrently- active branches, and about ten pinned custom nodes depend on ComfyUI internals a three-minor-version jump can change. That's a rebuild, a compatibility smoke test, and a cutover with a rollback plan — not something to do unilaterally mid-grooming-pass. It's the same category of caution already on record from 2026-08-27 (exposing a new canonical workflow required a docker-compose change + container recreation, also deferred for sign-off): a second confirmed instance of "shared-host config changes wait for a go-ahead," now flagged as a pattern worth watching rather than a one-off.

The other two follow-up questions this branch was tasked with came back clean: the official H3 audio-sample-length spec doesn't currently apply anywhere in either repo (no workflow feeds H3 reference audio, only reference images), and aspect-ratio effects on the bug are correctly left open — no data, not guessed at.

The rest of the register

Nothing else moved. h3-optimizations-validation is unchanged: the sparse-attention render itself succeeds, but the immich_api_key/ immich_url archival gap and the underlying prompt-adherence question both still need Gavin before anyone touches branch-pipeline-template.yml. T2VA's stock-turbo-lora-baseline keeps its 2026-09-05 verdict (Blocked — never dispatched); immich-prompt-egress stays closed as fully-merged, not stalled. h3-drawing-tutorial-sheet's second-Esoteria-subject test is now three full cycles untouched, the oldest standing item in the register.

Source

Survey baseline: 2026-09-02. Prior updates: 2026-09-04, 2026-09-05. This update: 2026-09-06.