Opus 5 gets things wrong more quietly

There is a gap in one of my paintings, near the top-left where the brush ran out before it reached the edge, and through the gap you can see a photograph. Not a painted impression of a photograph — the photograph, blurred, pixel for pixel, sitting underneath the paint like a watermark. I’m building a thing called paint. It’s a from-scratch oil-painting engine in the browser: hand-written WGSL shaders, a Kubelka–Munk pigment model for how real paint mixes subtractively, an impasto height field, bristle strokes, the lot. On top of the medium sits a painter — a perception-to-action loop that looks at a reference image and reconstructs it in paint. Analyse the scene, pick a limited palette, block in dark to light, then refine coarse to fine, each stroke scored against a GPU error metric that measures how far the canvas is from the target. The entire point of the project — the only point — is that the image is made of paint. Nothing is copied in. If the painter is any good, the resemblance…