# Archive

> **This folder is a historical and reference record. It is not instruction.**
> Nothing here describes current priorities or the current plan. Do not follow a procedure from this
> folder. The current, load-bearing answers to "what do I test" / "what's broken" / "what's missing
> for MVP" live in **[`mvp/`](../mvp/README.md)** — read that first.

As of 2026-08-02, this folder absorbed **all** of the project's accumulated documentation — not just the
executed build-chain history, but also the full `docs/` (engineering rules, integration contracts, flow
atlas, status/backlog) and `product/` (business requirements, data model, payments research) trees that
used to live at the repo root. That reorganization was a deliberate cleanup: those trees had grown large
enough to slow down MVP-focused work, and their two truly current-state questions — "how do I test this"
and "what's blocking/missing for MVP" — were distilled forward into `mvp/`. Everything else here is kept
as raw material for a future, more thorough compaction pass; nothing in `mvp/` links back into this folder.

Everything in the pre-existing subfolders below was additionally written in the imperative, as a prompt for
an agent to execute. The work described was executed weeks to months ago; the code has moved on since.
Reading a file in this tree as if it were a live instruction is the exact failure mode this archive exists
to prevent.

---

## What's here

| Folder | Was | Date range | Superseded by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| `build-chain/phases/` | `dev/phases/` — 32 executed build prompts (backend 0–15, frontend 0–15) plus `_shared/` conventions | 2026-06-28 (single day, all executed) | `docs/rules/` (conventions), `docs/flows/` (§7 "How to test" sections), `docs/status/decisions.md` (§5 "Critical rules") — all now archived alongside this folder, see below |
| `build-chain/working-context/` | `dev/shared-working-context/` — per-phase STATUS files, 50 handoff/report files, the frontend request ledger, the mocks registry | 2026-06-28 → 2026-07-20 | `docs/status/decisions.md`, `docs/status/implemented.md`, `docs/status/backlog.md` (67 REQs → `BL-###`) |
| `build-chain/contracts/` | `dev/contracts/` — the original hand-written API contract layer + the frozen 2026-07-13 OpenAPI snapshot | 2026-06-28 → 2026-07-13 | `docs/integration/` (refreshed against 2026-07-29 code, domain-by-domain) |
| `post-phase/` | `dev/post-phase/` — hardening (18 items), refinement (10 phases), server follow-up plans, and the 15-phase UI overhaul (plans + design audits) | 2026-07-10 → 2026-07-28 | `docs/status/backlog.md` (hardening + server items, re-verified against code, not trusted from checkboxes), `docs/status/decisions.md` (refinement decisions), `docs/flows/testing-setup.md` (RUNBOOK.md, manual-testing-plan.md), the `frontend-designer` skill (UI design reality) |
| `manual-testing/` | `dev/manual-testing/` — two iterations of human testing notes + screenshots (the only visual record of the pre-overhaul UI) | 2026-07-27 | `docs/status/backlog.md` (unfinished items); screenshots are kept as-is, unlinked from any live doc |
| `clarify-chain/` | `docs/_plan/` — the plan that produced the first documentation clean-up pass (the one that built `docs/` and `docs/status/backlog.md` out of the rows above) | 2026-07-29 → 2026-08-02 | superseded in turn by the 2026-08-02 consolidation into `mvp/` described at the top of this file |
| `docs/` | The engineering-truth tree produced by `clarify-chain/` — rules, integration contracts, the 23-flow test atlas, status/backlog/roadmap | 2026-07-29 → 2026-08-02 | `mvp/test-flows.md` (flow atlas, distilled) and `mvp/blockers.md` (backlog/roadmap, distilled) |
| `product/` | Business truth — the 14 business-requirement areas, the data model, payments research, market/legal research | pre-existing, never previously archived | `mvp/blockers.md` and `mvp/forgotten-features.md` pull the launch-critical and scope-decision facts forward; the rest (schema detail, market research) has no live equivalent — read it here if you need it |

`dev/README.md`'s own context (why this history exists at all — the derivation from an open-source
starter, the phase-chain-then-post-phase-then-UI-overhaul shape) is folded into this file rather than
kept as a separate leaf.

## Known-stale content preserved as-is

A few contradictions between this archive and current reality were found and resolved by the chain
that produced it, recorded in full in `clarify-chain/open-contradictions.md`. Two are worth flagging
here because they sit in files a reader might otherwise trust:

- `post-phase/manual-testing-plan.md` and some of `post-phase/refinement/RUNBOOK.md` still instruct
  `dotnet user-secrets` — removed from the codebase in `5885280`. Config lives in `appsettings.*.json`
  and `.env.*` files; see `docs/README.md#configuration` in this same archive.
- `post-phase/hardening/issues.md` shows 18 of 18 items unticked as of 2026-07-17, but four later
  work chains ran without updating it. The real state, as of the 2026-08-02 consolidation, is
  distilled in [`../mvp/blockers.md`](../mvp/blockers.md).

## `docs/` and `product/` — how they got here

Both were live, current-truth trees at the repo root until 2026-08-02. Neither was wrong or out of date —
they were simply large enough (83 and 48 files respectively, plus this folder's pre-existing ~220) that
finding "what do I test" or "what's blocking MVP" meant reading through a great deal of settled history and
reference material first. [`../mvp/`](../mvp/README.md) now carries those two live questions forward in
three short files; everything else that made `docs/` and `product/` valuable — the full business-requirement
write-ups, the ~54-table data model, the per-domain API contracts, the payments/legal research, the
per-flow technical trace with file:line evidence — is preserved here, unedited, for whoever does the next,
more thorough compaction pass.
