[1.0 T9] Replace feature inventories with goal-linked changes and site-wide search #185

Problem and outcome

Present understandable product evolution, with relevant reasoning available on demand instead of a mandatory goal/proposal/approval form for every feature.

Interaction contract

Keep FluencyLoop. Proposed positioning: Stay fluent as people and agents evolve the product.

Use retained product reasoning automatically. Explain consequential choices at the right depth. Recommend a path. Continue within agreed intent. Ask when human judgment is needed. Update the shared model at natural boundaries.

The flagship goal/principles/precedents/tradeoffs reasoning is integrated into the existing design explanation at proportional depth. It is not a mandatory recital, proposal form, or new approval exchange. People must remain able to understand and challenge the design.

Scope

• Lead Changes pages with human-readable title and actual product change; include intent/goal when known, deviations, and preserved/revised design. Link canonical rationale on demand.
• Keep branch IDs, sessions, and mechanical provenance secondary. Preserve legacy feature URLs and feature deltas without mandatory new associations.
• Hide empty administrative sections. Missing goals or historical links remain honest unknowns, not failed tasks or repair obligations.
• Search direction, principles, architecture, decisions, and changes locally with navigable results. Reuse records and avoid a persistent indexing service or duplicated summaries.

Acceptance criteria

• A reader can explain what changed and inspect the consequential rationale without decoding a branch slug.
• A legacy change with no explicit goal remains readable without fabricated intent or blocked content.
• Search finds rationale across record types and explains provenance without an approval/completeness dashboard.
• No new full rationale copy is authored solely for the Changes page.
• Keyboard interaction, narrow layouts, and old routes continue working.

Validation

Run site/browser fixtures for delegated decisions, unknown goals, cross-view search, empty states, legacy links, and on-demand rationale. Observe a person following a product change and challenging its tradeoff.

Starting points

site/server.js renderFeatureList/renderFeature; site/site.js catalog search; site/site.css; tests/site.bats and PowerShell mirror

Constraints

• Target dev; main distributes releases. No runtime implementation occurs in the planning PR.
• T1 is an observed pilot using existing artifacts before new infrastructure. Use its evidence to retain, narrow, or defer later scope.
• Recommend and continue within authorized intent; ask with a recommendation only for consequential unresolved judgment. Batch independent questions, reuse settled answers, and wait for dependent work. Silence is not approval.
• Absent briefs, historical link gaps, stale prose, and unreviewed metadata alone are advisory. Do not require onboarding, cleanup, or retrospective approvals to work.
• Unknown familiarity is not fluency and does not automatically require a blocking probe/check. Support requested guided learning without quizzes; keep calibration/preferences private. T5 explicitly updates inherited pause rules.
• Capture rationale once, link mechanical views, record outcome deviations at natural closure, distill once at wrap-up, and reuse unchanged context.
• Preserve append-only history/provenance; Bash and PowerShell implement the same contract. Core remains Node-optional; no new database, hosted service, or vector search.

Dependencies and size

• Task: T9
• Relative size: M (not a calendar estimate)
• Depends on: T4: [1.0 T4] Link existing design rationale and capture outcome deviations once #180, T6: [1.0 T6] Reconcile implementation and update review/backfill workflows #182, T8: [1.0 T8] Separate current architecture from decision history in the site #184
• Milestone: https://github.com/baokhang83/fluencyloop/milestone/3
• Plan: draft source
• Planning PR: docs: propose FluencyLoop 1.0 shared product direction and design #189