Ghost Ahead — origin note¶

Written: 2026-06-14 · Owner: Mohsen Seyedkazemi Ardebili Shipped as: design/specs/ghost-ahead.md Tier: design/ — public. Historical origin note; the spec above is the current source of truth.

The idea¶

The card names its own seduction and then talks itself out of it: the "autocomplete for speech" dream — a model guessing the next few words a user was about to say — was rejected as not real yet, on the evidence that even the best precedent (code-completion ghost text, on far more structured input than free speech) is ignored roughly two-thirds of the time. The idea that survived the filter was narrower and evidenced: don't predict what comes next, predict when the user is about to stop — from prosody, falling pitch, a lengthening pause, a partial transcript flattening out — and use that early signal to pre-warm the decoder so the gap between "I finished talking" and "the text appears" shrinks toward zero, with the authoritative commit always staying on the real hold-release so a wrong guess can never truncate what the user said.

What shipped¶

The pre-warm mechanism shipped as EndpointAnticipator in src/yazses/stt/endpoint.py, wired to the ghost-ahead feature toggle. It carries no user-facing behaviour to configure — the spec's own summary is "nothing to do — the decoder pre-warms for faster first words" — which matches the original card's framing of this as latency plumbing, not a new interaction.