add(changelog): retrospective entry for 2025-07-19 substance commit

Seeds the changelog/ directory with a retrospective entry dated to the
first commit of substance in this repo, written in May 2026 from the
content-farm pseudomonorepo cleanup. The convention didn't exist when
the original work shipped; this entry exists so the upcoming GitHub
Content API roll-up loader has something from this plugin to surface
on the content-farm splash.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>

changelog/2025-07-19_01.md

@@ -0,0 +1,51 @@
+---
+date_created: 2025-07-19
+date_modified: 2026-05-04
+title: "Streaming Perplexity through a modal — Perplexed comes online"
+lede: "Perplexed's identity moment landed July 19, 2025: the first time an API call to Perplexity ran through the plugin's modal and streamed responses back into the note. Not perfect, but real. Logged retrospectively from 2026 — the convention came after the fact."
+publish: true
+authors:
+  - Michael Staton
+augmented_with:
+  - Claude Code on Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context)
+files_changed:
+  - main.ts
+  - manifest.json
+  - package.json
+---
+
+## Why Care?
+
+Streaming is the difference between an LLM-augmented tool that feels like part of your editor and one that feels like waiting for a foreign API. The first time tokens started arriving in the modal *as they were generated*, with citations slotting in alongside, was the moment Perplexed felt like a real research companion rather than a search-then-paste detour.
+
+This is the retrospective for that moment.
+
+## What's New?
+
+(All historical, captured retrospectively. The forking and emergence: 2025-07-10 → 2025-07-19.)
+
+- **`init(project): initial commit for Perplexed Obsidian Plugin with basic readme, manifest, package.json`** (2025-07-10) — Perplexed officially split from the shared cite-wide-lineage repo. The Perplexity-specific work that had been mixed in with citation work for a month finally got its own home.
+- A week of structural work refactoring the modal to be search-and-stream-oriented rather than citation-transform-oriented.
+- **`milestone(streaming): api-call to Perplexity as made through modal now works and streams responses back. Not perfect, but works!`** (2025-07-19) — the streaming loop closed end-to-end. The exclamation point in the commit message was earned.
+
+## The arc
+
+The pre-history is unusual. For about a month before Perplexed got its own repo, the Perplexity integration work lived inside what would become Cite-Wide. The earliest "milestone(perplexica): now hitting perplexica" commit (June 7, 2025) is in *both* repos' histories because they shared a parent.
+
+That shared lineage made it hard to mature either feature. Citations want one kind of modal (input field, transformation logic, output preview). Search-augmented streaming wants a different kind (input field, streaming text region, citation pills as they arrive). Trying to do both in one plugin was a categorical mismatch.
+
+The July 10 fork was the right call. Within nine days, the Perplexed-specific modal was streaming responses back from Perplexity's `sonar-pro` model, with the citation markers preserved as the stream arrived. That's the substance.
+
+## What this enabled
+
+Everything Perplexed has done since traces back to the July 19 streaming milestone:
+
+- The two-tier modal architecture (TextEnhancementModal for the basic flow, TextEnhancementWithImagesModal for parallel text-and-image fetching) — both inherit the streaming response handler from this commit.
+- The provider rebrand from Perplexity to Perplexica/Vane (documented in `context-v/issues/Updating-Naming-to-Reflect-Provider-Rebrand.md`) — the streaming layer survived the rebrand because it was already abstracted enough.
+- Deep Research streaming, added in late August 2025 — built on the same streaming backbone.
+
+## Retrospective notes
+
+- Written 2026-05-04, ten months after the streaming milestone.
+- The phrase "Not perfect, but works!" in the original commit message is exactly the right voice for a milestone commit. We've borrowed it informally as a status descriptor for many subsequent plugins.
+- Some of the citation-modal commits visible in this repo's early history (the `iterate(modal): ...` series from July 7–8, 2025) are inherited from the shared lineage — that work properly belongs to Cite-Wide. Perplexed-specific work begins July 10.