Build Log · August 7, 2026
Fifty Real Missions and a Night Garden to Find Them In
Redesigned Alloy Commons mission content and browsing from scratch — a real 50-mission catalog, a new Relay contribution mechanic, and a depth-tiered 'Aisle' replacing the old Explore table.
- Alloy
- Commons
- Content Design
- UX
- mission concepts drafted
- 50
- full research/design passes before landing the right filter
- 3
- mockup review rounds on the Aisle
- 5
- existing unit tests passing (0 cover the new Aisle code)
- 24
mission concepts drafted
full research/design passes before landing the right filter
mockup review rounds on the Aisle
existing unit tests passing (0 cover the new Aisle code)
Timeline
Start
Research charge: 50 real-life missions for Alloy
Iterated through worthy-but-joyless, joyful-but-decorative, useful-but-clinical before Zeb supplied the missing test
Mid
Built the Relay contribution mechanic
New blind_continuation_v1 kind, seeded alongside a real target Mission (One Line Closer), per the 'no cold-designed kinds' rule
Mid
Designed and mocked up 'The Aisle'
Three visual directions, settled on Garden at Night; iterated through flip-card content, depth mechanics, and Street-View-style chevrons
End
Built the real Profile + Aisle pages
New contributor_profiles table, weighted mission-mix query, full Aisle component; adversarial audit found and fixed 2 real bugs
What shipped
50-mission draft catalog (docs/community/commons-seed-missions-v2-recognition-field.md) — full mission-row content organized by recognition category
New Relay contribution mechanic (blind_continuation_v1): schema field, contribution-kind file, UI form, steward-assign server action, design doc for the deferred AI-recommend follow-on
Seeded 'One Line Closer' as the real target Mission for the new mechanic
New contributor_profiles table + saveContributorProfile action + preferences card on the existing profile page
Weighted mission-mix query (getAisleMissionBuckets) — profile-match / needs-help / recently-active / wildcard buckets from real, derivable signals
The Aisle: a depth-tiered, proximity-gated browsing page replacing the default /commons/explore (old table view moved to /commons/explore/list as the secondary path)
Design doc (commons-profile-and-wander-design.md) kept in sync with what was actually built and settled through mockup review, not the original speculative draft
“I like the flip idea, now we need to solve the problem of making it feel like you are wandering around browsing yet keep the detail we have now on the card. how do we create the depth”