Stage timeline shift

• Status: done, opened 2026-08-31.
• Issue: none. The operator decided the shift directly in session and the work landed the same day; per project-creation, an issue exists when work is intended, and nothing here is still pending except the follow-ups below, which are hers to trigger.
• Launch plan: none, this is work on the plan itself, so it belongs to no row inside it (same footing as launch-plan-accuracy).

What is this?

December 2026 became the Prototype release, and Alpha moved to Summer 2027.

• The operator's driving concern: being 100% production ready by December is not realistic, so a December launch with real strangers was the wrong promise.
• Alpha keeps recruitment, the invite-only launch events, and the production cutover. Prototype absorbed testing, code review, legal clearance, and the grants-only funding search.
• The full mapping, rationale, and what moved where: design.md.

What is the current state?

Executed and pushed on claude/timeline-release-roadmap-7og3ft.

• The four pages under docs/business/launches/ carry the new dates, the new sorting test, and the new P0 reading.
• The milestone classifier guidance in tooling/scripts/classify-milestone.mjs changed in the same commit, so new issues sort by the new rules.

The admin dashboard's launch timeline follows the shift (operator go, same day).

• The hero blurb and the wick's hardcoded stops (apps/admin/src/admin/dashboard/dashboardCopy.js) now put the flame on Prototype at Dec 2026, Alpha ahead at Summer 2027, Beta undated.
• The progress chips derive from PROTOTYPE.md instead of ALPHA.md; the loader and helpers were renamed stage-agnostic (loadStagePhases and friends in releaseFeed.js), and the launch README's "We are in" parse now survives a clause after the stage name.
• Verified here: the full admin suite (714 tests) and the real parser against the real Prototype page. Deferred, named as the close step: the visual pass on deployed dev after merge, per testing.md (local admin login cannot mint tokens).

Three follow-ups remain, all named in design.md.

• Resort the GitHub milestones (Prove, Clear, and funding issues move from the Alpha milestone to Prototype; Alpha's due date becomes Summer 2027).
• Re-run the classifier dry run after the resort, since its 78% agreement was scored against the pre-shift hand sort.
• The canonical business plan Google Doc owns the roadmap; the operator updates it there.

What else is related?

• 2026-08-14 launch docs restructure: the plan whose "December is Alpha" conclusion this reverses; its structure is kept.
• launch-plan-accuracy: the ongoing repair project for the plan's row-level accuracy.
• No open issue tracks this subject (searched 2026-08-31).