lossless-group_perplexed-plugin/release-notes/0.3.0.md

0.3.0 turns Perplexed into a serious analyst tooling layer for Venture Capital, Private Equity, and equities-trading workflows. Three new directory templates produce 6-9K-word cited analyst drafts in a single Perplexity Deep Research run. Underneath them, four infrastructure fixes turn deep-research from a brittle "might work" workflow into something you can put real analyst time behind.

Why care?

If your work involves naming the actual companies in a market category, mapping who's playing where in an emerging market, or profiling the open specs an investment thesis depends on — 0.3.0 is the release where Perplexed becomes a serious analyst tooling layer, not just a notes-with-citations plugin.

Three new directory templates. Each produces a 6-9K-word cited analyst draft in a single Perplexity Deep Research run. Each was designed for the kind of document a VC analyst, PE associate, or equities-trading desk strategist hands to a partner or IC:

• Market-category profiles (concepts/Market-Categories/) name the companies in a category, sorted into three explicit financial-stage tiers — Incumbents (public / late-stage private / PE-owned), Challengers (Series C+ scale-ups), Innovators (Pre-Seed through Series B) — with separate Why Now / What's Happening sections covering CAGR and category-creation momentum, and a fully-sourced Industry Coverage section sub-grouped into Market Reports (Gartner, IDC, Forrester, ABI) / Industry Articles / Financial News (Bloomberg, FT, Pitchbook).
• Market-map drafts (lost-in-public/market-maps/) produce the analyst memo itself — 4-8 sub-segments, 20-40 named innovator cards with funding stage and lead investor, Market Dynamics with cited sizing data and capital concentration, and a Frontier section with open questions framed as questions.
• Standards-and-specs profiles (Sources/Standards-and-Specs/) turn an open protocol or convention into a strategic-context document — five-way authority typing (de-jure / consortium / vendor-led-open / community / de-facto), three-tier structural adoption framing plus notable holdouts, named editors, stewardship-transition stories, named public critics with their arguments. Surfaces what an analyst needs to know about a spec: is it surviving its originating vendor, who has it captured, who's working to break the capture.

Four infrastructure fixes — each one solving a class of "deep-research silently produces broken output" failure mode that would otherwise have kept the analyst-grade workflow brittle:

• Per-chunk idle-timeout discipline. The timer that decides "is this stream still alive?" is now armed per-chunk, not once per request. A healthy slow stream completes naturally regardless of total duration; a silently-stalled one fails in seconds, not at the wall-clock ceiling. Ported from the legacy PerplexityModal flow into the directory-template runtime.
• Per-template request-timeout-ms: cft override. Becomes the optional absolute wall-clock ceiling (belt-and-suspenders backstop on top of the idle timer). Set to 0 to disable entirely and rely on idle-only safety — the recommended setting for the two new analyst-grade templates.
• Per-template max-tokens: cft override. Fixes the silent-truncation pathology where Perplexity's default output cap (~8,192 tokens, ~6K words for sonar-deep-research) was ending the stream cleanly mid-template — full sources footer, no Notice, no truncation flag, looking like a healthy completion that just happened to be missing the back half. The three deep-research templates ship with max-tokens: 24000 (~18K-word budget).
• Strengthened rendering-discipline partials. mermaid-discipline.md rewritten with paired BAD/GOOD examples throughout, the & escape rule, an explicit \n vs <br/> ban, a six-item self-check before emit, and a simplify-rather-than-break ethos. New latex-discipline.md partial covers Obsidian MathJax delimiters and $ escaping. Both wired into concept-profile.md.

Diagnostic vocabulary for streaming failures

Symptom	Cause
Mid-sentence cutoff (ends with a partial word); no sources footer; "stream went idle" Notice or no Notice at all	Wall-clock timer (request-timeout-ms:) or idle timer (stream-idle-timeout-ms:) fired during streaming
Clean section-end cutoff; sources footer renders correctly with all citations; no Notice	Perplexity max_tokens cap; stream completed via finish_reason: "length"

The three streaming knobs (request-timeout-ms, stream-idle-timeout-ms, max-tokens) are independent — a template can hit any of them, all of them, or none. The three new deep-research templates set all three generously so analyst-grade runs land reliably.

Editorial discipline diverges by template

The three new deep-research templates share a common technical substrate but apply different editorial stances on big tech:

• Market-map caps big tech at 1-of-5-10 in any sub-bucket to counteract training-data bias — the analyst's job is to name the named operators driving the curve.
• Standards-and-specs names big tech freely in the Incumbents tier (large dominant implementations) and aggressively in the Innovators tier (where the next extensions come from). Suppression would distort the implementation landscape.
• Market-category names big tech as the FIRST move in Incumbents because for a category profile, knowing the incumbents IS the work product.

Each template's system prompt states its editorial stance explicitly so a future template-modifier doesn't accidentally cross-pollinate the wrong stance across templates.

Upgrade notes

Vault template drift — the gotcha worth five seconds of attention. If your Content-Dev/Templates/concept-profile.md was seeded before today, it may be missing the {{include: mermaid-discipline}} and {{include: latex-discipline}} directives. Without them, every concept-profile run generates Mermaid with no rendering rules in scope at all, producing broken diagrams 4-of-5 times. Open the file, find the Defining and Describing section, and insert both directives immediately after the "render a mermaid codefence here" instruction. The re-seed button won't add them — it only writes missing files.

Re-seed pulls in the new templates and the new partial. The seven shipped templates plus the two partials are bundled into main.js. After upgrading, click Settings → Directory templates → Re-seed templates to write the new files into your vault. The button only adds files whose filenames don't already exist; nothing existing gets overwritten. You'll see market-map-profile.md, standards-and-specs-profile.md, market-category-profile.md appear in templates and latex-discipline.md appear in partials.

Backward compatibility. All cft-block additions are opt-in. Templates that don't declare the new knobs inherit sensible defaults. The four pre-0.3.0 templates (concept, vocabulary, source, toolkit) run unchanged.

Plugin-level default request timeout bumped 10 min → 30 min. Visible in Settings → Directory templates → Request timeout (ms). If you had previously set a custom value, it's preserved.

Deferred to 0.4.x

Three follow-ups that surfaced during the 0.3.0 work cycle:

• A cf_finish_reason frontmatter stamp on every run — would have made the max-tokens diagnostic instant instead of an investigation.
• A "Continue directory template on current file" command — for runs cut off by max-tokens, would re-prompt with only the missing sections plus URL-keyed citation merge.
• A "diff and patch user files" mode for re-seed — the vault-drift bug we caught is structural: re-seed only writes missing files, so partial/template improvements never reach users who've already seeded.

Compatibility

minAppVersion: 1.8.10 — unchanged from 0.2.1. Desktop-only — unchanged. No new external dependencies; the three new templates and two partials are bundled into main.js at build time. The cleanup pipeline behavior (think-block wrap, image-marker swap, sources footer) is unchanged.