It's a fun part of the code to work on for sure :).

I started trying out datastar in another part of the app by the way, mostly for the frontend signals so far e.g. https://github.com/jacobobryant/yakread/blob/8a61443235d1f6f...

Since this app isn't collaborative it's not clear to me if there'd be any benefit of doing any long-lived SSE vs. just sticking with the request-response model I'm already doing with htmx. Also since various parts of the app do take 100 - 1000ms to render/query, so rerendering the whole page on any change I don't think would be a good fit. But even just having the signals part baked in is pretty nice.