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v1.2.0 ·

Ideas that outlive the session: the backlog

The problem

The framework has no "just write it down" path. Capturing an idea today requires an instance (even a spike drags in claims and phase machinery), so ideas shared mid-task get dropped or derail the current phase. .aidlc/ideas/ should be a first-class inbox: capture cheap at any moment, process later.

How it could be solved

An idea you have while working on something else is worth almost nothing if capturing it costs you your place. So the first question was where captured ideas should live, and the answer that mattered most was whether git should see them at all.

Keeping them out of git is tempting — a scratchpad feels like it should be private, and untracked files never cause merge conflicts. But ideas are durable, documentation-like content. They are worth sharing, worth reviewing, and worth surviving a re-clone. An untracked backlog quietly evaporates the first time you move machines. So ideas are tracked, with one deliberate restraint: nothing is auto-committed. Staging stays a decision the human makes.

The second question was smaller and stranger: what happens when two ideas land on the same day and want the same filename. Silently overwriting is unacceptable, and silently suffixing everything is noise. The rule became: ask, but only when the answer is genuinely ambiguous — extend the existing idea, or start a new one with a numeric suffix.

The last decision was about scope, and it was really about whether the feature was coherent at all. Promotion — turning a captured idea into a real lifecycle instance — looked like a natural v2. But a backlog you can only add to is a drawer you never open, and the "browse and promote" menu entry would have been hollow without it. It shipped in v1.

How AIDLC solves it

  • Merge f26bb57 on main (branch feat/20260815-idea-backlog, commit 6c3e480), pushed to origin with tag v1.2.0.
  • GitHub release: https://github.com/rasensio/aidlc/releases/tag/v1.2.0
  • npm: @rasensio/aidlc-content@1.2.0 published (verified via npm view: 1.2.0).
  • npm: @rasensio/aidlc@1.2.0 — user is publishing manually (npm 2FA OTP expired twice during the prepublish build+test hook; user opted to run npm publish --access public in packages/cli themselves). Until then, dist-tags.latest remains 1.1.0.