v1.2.0 ·
Ideas that outlive the session: the backlog
An idea that comes up while you are working on something else is worth almost nothing if capturing it costs you your place. In AIDLC it did. There was no way to just write one down. Even a spike dragged in claims and phase machinery, so ideas shared mid-task either got dropped or derailed what you were doing.
What changed
There is now an inbox for ideas. You capture one cheaply at any moment and deal with it later. You can also browse what you have captured and promote an idea into a real lifecycle instance.
Why this way
The first question was whether git should see the ideas at all. Keeping them out is tempting. A scratchpad feels 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 restraint: nothing is committed for you. Staging stays your decision.
The second question was smaller. What happens when two ideas land on the same day and want the same filename? Silently overwriting is wrong. Silently suffixing everything is noise. The rule is to 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. Promotion, turning a captured idea into a real instance, looked like a natural second version. 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 the first version.
What it did not get
The release itself was messy at the end. The content package was published to npm as 1.2.0. The CLI package was not. My npm one-time code expired twice during the prepublish build and test hook, so I ran npm publish --access public in packages/cli by hand. Until I did, the latest tag on npm stayed at 1.1.0.