Brainstorm Archive

• Status: closed. Rescued 2026-08-30 from .superpowers/brainstorm/, which was gitignored and had never been committed.
• Contents: 28 design and architecture mockups from 10 brainstorm sessions run between 2026-03-29 and 2026-05-26.
• Related project folders: query-console, merchant-and-venue-dashboards, ad-network-first-class.

What is this?

The visual half of ten design conversations, which existed only as untracked files on this VM.

• The superpowers plugin ran a throwaway local web server per session and wrote each mockup it pushed to the browser into .superpowers/brainstorm/<session-id>/content/.
• .gitignore line 116 ignores .superpowers/, so none of it reached a commit. The one exception is panel-layout.html, which was committed before that ignore rule landed.
• The terminal side of each conversation is gone. What survives is the pictures, plus a handful of recorded clicks (see What did she pick?).

It was preserved because the same failure had already cost real work.

• On 2026-08-30 three merchant design directions were found to have been lost, for exactly this reason: they lived only on a dead session's local server and were never committed.
• This directory was the same shape, still recoverable, so it was rescued before the plugin that produced it was uninstalled.

What is in it?

Folder	Date	Surface it relates to
2026-03-29-vscode-project-info-panel	2026-03-29	Lantern Control VS Code extension, sidebar tree view
2026-03-30-hero-card-icon	2026-03-30	Web app, HeroOfferCard 56x56 icon slot
2026-04-25-offers-migration	2026-04-25	Merchants API plus the admin portal Offers tab
2026-04-27-assistant-button-icon	2026-04-27	Chat assistant button icon, at its real 64x72 size
2026-05-03-query-console	2026-05-03	Analytics Query Console redesign
2026-05-07-offer-form-redesign	2026-05-07	Merchant portal, Create Offer form
2026-05-07-offer-form-flush-layout	2026-05-07	Merchant portal, Create Offer form shell and tab strip
2026-05-26-vendor-pages	2026-05-26	Admin portal, per-vendor billing pages

The offer form has three separate sessions in here, and they run in order.

• April 25 is the first pass: the migration architecture, the Offers tab component structure, and a form with a live placement preview sidebar.
• May 7 morning is the redesign: which navigation pattern, where per-placement overrides live, where the preview panel goes, then the settled full design.
• May 7 afternoon is the shell decision: flush layout plus a routed Offers tab strip, ending with the version that marks the merchant left nav and topbar as do-not-touch zones.

recommendation.html is the one file here that is a decision rather than an option set.

• It is the assistant's pick out of the 2026-04-27 icon exploration: a paper lantern with the brand flame as the hero, no hardware, sized to read at 64x72.

What did she pick?

The session logs recorded four clicks, and they are the only surviving record of those choices.

• The logs themselves were dropped (see below). The choices are transcribed here because they are the content and the log file was the container.

Session	Screen	Choice recorded
2026-05-03 query console	pain-points.html	other (three times), meaning she answered in the terminal instead
2026-05-03 query console	layouts.html	rail
2026-05-07 offer form redesign	navigation-pattern.html	sidebar (option B, section nav in a left rail)
2026-05-07 offer form redesign	per-placement-overrides.html	subnav (option C, placements nested under a sidebar sub-nav)
2026-05-26 vendor pages	shell-layout.html	b (single scrolling page, reusing the Reports SystemSection idiom)

What was dropped, and why?

19 of the 47 HTML files were dropped. Nothing was deleted from .superpowers/.

• The original directory is untouched, so any of this is recoverable until the directory itself is removed.

Dropped	Count	Reason
waiting.html, landing.html, welcome.html	7	Placeholder pages the harness showed while the conversation moved back to the terminal. One of them is 143 bytes of "Continuing in terminal".
270068-1779834892/full-page.html	1	Byte-identical duplicate of the vendor page mockup kept under 2026-05-26-vendor-pages.
offer-form-mockup.html	1	Superseded within its own session by offer-form-with-preview.html, which is the same form plus the preview sidebar.
lantern-directions.html, silhouette-only.html, lantern-floor.html	3	Each has a -v2 in the same session that its own subtitle describes as the closer pass.
old-lantern-with-flame.html and its v2 and v3	3	A four-step refinement of one mark with an identical subtitle throughout. v3 and v4 are byte-identical, so v4 is the whole chain.
full-design-mockup.html and its v2 and v3	3	Three passes at the Create Offer design, all superseded by full-design-final.html in the same session, which its own subtitle calls "all decisions baked in".
floating-direction-v2.html	1	Superseded by final-direction-v3.html, which is the same flush layout with the do-not-touch zones marked.
state/ directories	19 files	Server pid, port, and start and stop records for local servers that died in April and May. The one piece of content in them, the recorded clicks, is transcribed above.

How do I look at one of these?

They are HTML fragments, not pages, and the harness stylesheet is gone.

• Each file starts at an <h2>. There is no <html>, <head>, or <style>, because the plugin's server wrapped them at serve time.
• Inline style attributes carry most of the mockup, so opening a file directly in a browser still reads. The wrapper classes (subtitle, section, mockup, mockup-header, mockup-body, label) render unstyled.

They are preserved verbatim, so they are evidence rather than documentation.

• No file was edited on the way in. Every archived file is byte-identical to its source in .superpowers/brainstorm/, verified by checksum at rescue time.

Why is this exempt from the em dash lint?

27 of the 28 files carry an em dash, 117 in total, and they are not ours to rewrite.

• These are historical artifacts. Editing them to satisfy a gate would destroy the thing the archive exists to hold, and the verbatim guarantee above is what makes them worth keeping.
• tooling/scripts/lint.no-em-dash.js scans tracked .html and fails any file above its baseline, which is zero for a new file.
• Resolved. The operator made the call on 2026-08-30 and the EXCLUDE entry for docs/projects/brainstorm-archive/mockups/ was applied in 66822019, alongside the existing docs/projects/*/harness/*.json exemption that exists for the same reason (machine-produced evidence, not authored prose). npm run lint:emdash went from exit 1 on 27 files to exit 0.
• The exemption stops at mockups/. This README.md sits one level up, is still scanned, and is still enforced at a baseline of zero, so the prose we actually author about the archive stays under the rule. That was verified rather than assumed: a control em dash appended to this file still failed the gate, naming this file, before it was restored.