Add Ask the Smol lab (search → persona → chat + Gemini adapter + preview fallback)

[tacticalnoot]

Motivation

• Provide a lightweight labs experiment that lets visitors pick any Smol and chat with a compact, fictional "song-spirit" derived from that Smol's metadata.
• Make the persona-to-model pipeline transparent and inspectable so humans can see the universal system prompt, the per-smol context, and the final composed prompt.
• Reuse existing Smol data loaders and the repo's Gemini/radio patterns so the feature degrades gracefully if server-side keys are missing.

Description

• Add a new lab route /labs/ask-the-smol (with /labs/smol-oracle as a redirect) and a Svelte client component AskTheSmolLab.svelte that loads the canonical Smol corpus, supports search/select, shows a selected-smol panel, chat UI, suggested starters, and a collapsible Prompt Inspector.
• Implement a defensive normalizer normalizeSmol.ts and typed persona package (types.ts + buildSmolPersonaPrompt.ts) that compose the single universal system prompt and a compact SMOL CONTEXT block used for every query.
• Add a server-side adapter src/pages/api/ask-the-smol.ts that mirrors the existing radio/AI pattern (@google/genai, same-origin guardrails, rate limit) and calls Gemini when GEMINI_API_KEY is present; it returns structured error JSON when the key is missing or the provider call fails.
• Provide a deterministic, honest local preview fallback (localPreviewReply.ts) so the UX and prompt inspector remain usable without a working LLM, and add a browser-side API client askSmolClient.ts.
• Register the experiment in labs/registry.json and add documentation docs/labs/ASK_THE_SMOL.md explaining data sources, prompt composition, fallback behavior, safety rules, and testing steps.

Files added or modified (high level): src/pages/labs/ask-the-smol.astro, src/components/labs/AskTheSmolLab.svelte, src/pages/api/ask-the-smol.ts, src/lib/smolPersona/* (types, normalizer, prompt builder, local preview, client), labs/registry.json, and docs/labs/ASK_THE_SMOL.md.

Testing

• pnpm test (unit tests) passed (all existing automated tests in tests/*.test.js ran and passed).
• pnpm build completed successfully; the build emitted existing repo warnings (large chunks and a few module warnings) but finished without errors.
• pnpm check (TypeScript/Svelte check) surfaced pre-existing unrelated type errors in other components (these are not introduced by this PR) and therefore failed; the new Ask the Smol files are TypeScript-checked and typed to the repo conventions.

Notes: the runtime dev server was started successfully for manual verification; Gemini was not present in the environment (GEMINI_API_KEY missing), so API calls fall back to the local preview mode; attempting an automated Playwright screenshot in this environment failed due to an external browser download restriction (CDN 403) unrelated to the feature code.

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Codex Task

[cloudflare-workers-and-pages]

Deploying smol-fe with    Cloudflare Pages

Latest commit:	9cdce7a
Status:	⚡️  Build in progress...

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