[DerekMarshall]

The working dot's colour breath, smoothed. Before, it walked a 6-phase ping-pong over the four spice-heat stops at 4 Hz, so each frame jumped up to 51 in a channel, and the dot read as cycling rather than breathing.

Change

• An eased breath. The dot breathes along the same pepper red → ember → orange → spark ramp on a cosine: 16 frames to a breath at 10 Hz (1.6 s, about the old cycle's length). No frame moves a channel more than 30, and the steps shrink toward either end, so the turns ease instead of bouncing. Half a breath:
  #E03222 → #E23720 → #E9471B → #F35E13 → #FA7C12 → #FF9815 → #FFAF26 → #FFBF32 → #FFC436
• Still const and pure. The maths is integer, with the cosine tabulated in BREATH_COSINE, so spicy_pulse_color stays const and the draw stays pure.
• 256-colour terminals breathe too. They used to alternate Red/LightYellow, a blink. They now get the same RGB breath, which the frame's downgrade_buffer quantizes into a stepped warm ramp.
• Unchanged: mono, per-tab phase offsets, and the 0 fps idle invariant. AgentAnim is still armed only while an agent works.

Cost: 10 redraws a second instead of 4 while any agent works. Only the dot's cell changes, so the terminal sees a few bytes per frame.

Tests

Five new, in render::chrome:

• smoothness: every frame step is ≤ 30, including the wrap;
• easing: the step at a turn is under half the step mid-breath;
• range: pepper red to spark exactly, periodic and symmetric;
• the table is the cosine;
• a 256-colour terminal shows at least 4 distinct indices, checked through the dot itself.

Five mutations, each failing its test:

• the old 6-phase walk;
• a linear (un-eased) breath — the first version of the easing test missed it, so it was tightened;
• dropping the blend;
• a table value off by one;
• restoring the two-hue fallback.

make check-ci: === GATE: PASS ===, 3,197 library tests.

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