Arc42Stories Needs Three Tiers
The build came up clean first pass — all 17 email-inbound tests through, no IDLE timing failures. After two sessions of coaxing GreenMail into behaving, that counts as a result.
The Profile Gap
The plan was to file the arc42stories migration issue for connectors — look at what devtown did, figure out the equivalent for a library, write the issue. Straightforward.
Then I actually read arc42stories-casehub-profile.md. I’d assumed from context that foundation modules just use the base spec directly, no profile. The profile says it applies to casehub-aml, casehub-clinical, casehub-devtown, casehub-life, casehub-drafthouse, QuarkMind — confirming the assumption. But reading it carefully, the profile carries two distinct things. The Foundation Layer Taxonomy (Domain baseline → work → qhorus → ledger → engine → trust routing) is genuinely harness-app-specific — it describes how apps integrate the foundation, not how the foundation documents itself. Everything else — the artifact schema, §8 crosscutting convention references, the anti-pattern inline requirement, the platform references for §3 — applies equally to a foundation module writing its own ARC42STORIES.MD.
That gap turned into parent#132: extend the spec with a three-tier taxonomy.
Application — systems integrating foundation modules progressively. Harness apps. Many layers, Chapters = foundation module integrations.
Foundation — core infrastructure. Fewer layers. Chapters = capability increments, not foundation-module integrations. connectors, work, qhorus, ledger, engine all sit here.
Extension — optional building blocks that orbit foundation or application. Pluggable, less central.
“Ecosystem” was the first word I reached for and it’s wrong — ecosystem means the whole surrounding community, not a level within it. “Core” doesn’t work as a tier name either; it already does too many jobs (submodule naming convention, informal shorthand for the most critical modules). “Extension” is precise.
connectors#13 (migrate DESIGN.md → ARC42STORIES.MD) can proceed on foundation-tier assumptions now. The spec update formalises it later.
Five Branches and a Zombie
Branch hygiene: five branches stamped closed, main pushed to origin (two commits had been sitting unshipped since the IMAP work), one worktree cleaned up. The worktree’s lock turned out to be held by a Claude process that had been running for 97 hours — killed it, removed the lock, done.
The five closed branches were all squash-merged work with no unique content: issues 4, 6, 7, 9, and 11. Each branch’s code was on main; the branches just hadn’t been stamped.