## Context

ClawFort currently stores and displays full headline/summary text from the ingestion pipeline and renders feed content directly in cards/hero. There is no dedicated concise summary format, modal reading experience, or summary-specific analytics lifecycle.

This change introduces a structured summary artifact per fetched article, with template-driven rendering and event instrumentation.

Constraints:
- Reuse existing Perplexity integration for generation.
- Keep source attribution visible and preserved.
- Prefer royalty-free image retrieval via MCP integration when available, with deterministic fallback path.
- Ensure modal interactions are fully tagged in Umami.

## Goals / Non-Goals

**Goals:**
- Generate and persist concise summary content at ingestion time.
- Persist and return template-compatible summary fields and image metadata.
- Present summary in a modal dialog with required visual structure.
- Track modal open/close/link-out analytics events consistently.

**Non-Goals:**
- Replacing the existing core feed API model end-to-end.
- Building a full long-form article reader.
- Introducing user-authored summary editing workflows.
- Supporting arbitrary analytics providers beyond current Umami hooks.

## Decisions

### Decision: Persist structured summary fields alongside article records
**Decision:** Store summary artifacts as explicit fields (TL;DR bullets, summary body, citation/source, summary image URL/credit) linked to each article.

**Rationale:**
- Enables deterministic API response shape for modal rendering.
- Keeps summary retrieval simple at read time.
- Avoids dynamic prompt regeneration during page interactions.

**Alternatives considered:**
- Generate summary on-demand at modal open: rejected due to latency and cost spikes.
- Store a single blob markdown string only: rejected due to weaker field-level control and analytics granularity.

### Decision: Use Perplexity for summary generation with strict output schema
**Decision:** Prompt Perplexity to return machine-parseable JSON fields that map directly to the template sections.

**Rationale:**
- Existing Perplexity integration and operational familiarity.
- Structured output reduces frontend parsing fragility.

**Alternatives considered:**
- Free-form text generation then regex parsing: rejected as brittle.

### Decision: Prefer MCP royalty-free image sourcing, fallback to deterministic non-MCP source path
**Decision:** When MCP image retrieval integration is configured, use it first; otherwise use a configured royalty-free provider path and fallback placeholder.

**Rationale:**
- Satisfies preference for MCP leverage while preserving reliability.
- Maintains legal/licensing constraints and avoids blocked ingestion.

**Alternatives considered:**
- Hard dependency on MCP only: rejected due to availability/runtime coupling risk.

### Decision: Add modal-specific analytics event contract
**Decision:** Define and emit explicit Umami events for summary modal open, close, and source link-out clicks.

**Rationale:**
- Makes summary engagement measurable independently of feed interactions.
- Prevents implicit/ambiguous event interpretation.

**Alternatives considered:**
- Reusing existing generic card click events only: rejected due to insufficient modal-level observability.

## Risks / Trade-offs

- **[Risk] Summary generation adds ingest latency** -> Mitigation: bounded retries and skip/fallback behavior.
- **[Risk] Provider output schema drift breaks parser** -> Mitigation: strict validation + fallback summary text behavior.
- **[Risk] Royalty-free image selection may be semantically weak** -> Mitigation: relevance prompt constraints and placeholder fallback.
- **[Trade-off] Additional stored fields increase row size** -> Mitigation: concise field limits and optional archival policy alignment.
- **[Risk] Event overcount from repeated modal toggles** -> Mitigation: standardize open/close trigger boundaries and dedupe rules in frontend logic.

## Migration Plan

1. Add summary/image metadata fields or related model for persisted summary artifacts.
2. Extend ingestion flow to generate structured summary + citation via Perplexity.
3. Integrate royalty-free image retrieval with MCP-preferred flow and fallback.
4. Extend API payloads to return summary-modal-ready data.
5. Implement frontend modal rendering with exact template and analytics tags.
6. Validate event tagging correctness and rendering fallback behavior.

Rollback:
- Disable modal entrypoint and return existing feed behavior while retaining stored summary data.

## Open Questions

- Should TL;DR bullet count be fixed (for example 3) or provider-adaptive within a bounded range?
- Should summary modal open be card-click only or have an explicit "Read Summary" CTA in each card?
- Which royalty-free provider is preferred default when MCP is unavailable?
