Synthetic face pool — 1000 StyleGAN headshots, ComfyUI hot-swap, 60x smaller thumbs

Worker cards now ship a real photo per person instead of monogram tiles:

  - fetch_face_pool.py pulls 1000 faces from thispersondoesnotexist.com
  - tag_face_pool.py runs deepface for gender/race/age, excludes <22yo
  - manifest.jsonl: 952 servable, gender/race buckets populated
  - /headshots/_thumbs/ pre-resized to 384px webp (587KB -> 11KB,
    60x smaller; without this Chrome's parallel-connection budget
    drops ~75% of tiles in a 40-card grid)
  - /headshots/:key gender x race x age intersection bucketing with
    gender-only fallback when intersection is sparse
  - /headshots/generate/:key ComfyUI on-demand for the contractor
    profile spotlight (cold ~1.5s, cached ~1ms; worker-derived
    djb2 seed makes faces deterministic-per-worker but unique
    across workers sharing the same prompt)
  - serve_imagegen.py _cache_key() now includes seed (was caching
    by prompt only -> 3 different worker seeds collapsed to 1
    cached image; verified fix produces 3 distinct md5s)
  - confidence-default name resolution: Xavier->man+hispanic,
    Aisha->woman+black, etc. Every worker resolves to a bucket.

End-to-end: playwright run on /?q=forklift+operators+IL -> 21/21
cards loaded, 0 broken, all 384px webp.

Cache + binary pool gitignored; manifest tracked.

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

scripts/serve_imagegen.py

@@ -29,8 +29,14 @@ CACHE_DIR.mkdir(parents=True, exist_ok=True)
 WORKFLOW_PATH = "/opt/ComfyUI/workflows/editorial_hero.json"
 
 
-def _cache_key(prompt, width, height, steps):
-    return hashlib.sha256(f"{prompt}|{width}|{height}|{steps}".encode()).hexdigest()[:24]
+def _cache_key(prompt, width, height, steps, seed=None):
+    # Include seed so callers can vary outputs deterministically without
+    # the proxy collapsing to a single cached image. None == legacy
+    # (omitted from the key for backward compatibility).
+    bits = f"{prompt}|{width}|{height}|{steps}"
+    if seed is not None:
+        bits += f"|{seed}"
+    return hashlib.sha256(bits.encode()).hexdigest()[:24]
 
 def _cache_get(key):
     fp = CACHE_DIR / f"{key}.webp"
@@ -178,8 +184,9 @@ class ImageHandler(BaseHTTPRequestHandler):
         steps = min(max(int(body.get("steps", 50)), 1), 80)
         seed = body.get("seed")
 
-        # Cache check
-        key = _cache_key(prompt, width, height, steps)
+        # Cache check — seed is part of the key so per-worker requests
+        # don't collapse to a single cached portrait.
+        key = _cache_key(prompt, width, height, steps, seed)
         cached = _cache_get(key)
         if cached:
             self._json(200, {"image": cached, "format": "webp", "width": width, "height": height,
@@ -210,6 +217,11 @@ class ImageHandler(BaseHTTPRequestHandler):
 
         elapsed_ms = int((time.time() - t0) * 1000)
         img_b64 = base64.b64encode(img_bytes).decode()
+        # Recompute key with the actual seed used (when caller passed
+        # None, _comfyui_generate picks a random one and we want the
+        # cache to reflect that so re-requests with the same returned
+        # seed hit the disk).
+        key = _cache_key(prompt, width, height, steps, seed)
         _cache_put(key, img_bytes)
 
         self._json(200, {