Phase 1 essence
The current working contract — what today's build is committed to.
In Phase 1, Remoir proves that one person can capture, with rich metadata, the raw inputs of their life — and that those inputs stay under their control forever, surfaceable on demand.
The essence is deliberately ADR-safe: it commits to capture-once / full-metadata / sovereign / surface-forever semantics without committing to Moment-as-anchor (a directional, not yet ratified, decision per decisions.md 12-05-2026) or to the Membrane abstraction (a candidate principle per docs/principles.md 11-05-2026). If either is ratified during Phase 1, the working vision is bumped (v1.1, v1.2) without retirement.
The Phase 1 bet
Phase 1 is the foundation phase on which all later phases depend. Any number of users may run on their own isolated cells; there are no cross-cell features. A trusted-circle bootstrap (multiple users with cross-cell canonical entity resolution) is Phase 2 work; cross-cell sharing features are Phase 3 work. See decisions.md 13-05-2026 (Project phase model) for the five-phase Approach C definition.
The bet of Phase 1 is that a single user — Freek as the prototype user — can build a working memoir from frictionless capture + full-metadata raw storage + an asynchronous review surface, and that the experience is good enough to justify the platform as a serious product. If that bet holds, the platform expands. If it doesn't, the platform does not have a multi-cell future to extend into.
Phase 1 closes when: the first cross-cell feature ships. That is the architectural event that triggers the Phase 2 transition. The transition is real and observable; it does not happen on a calendar date.
How the north-star might concretize
A provisional sketch. Not load-bearing for decisions — decisions are tested against the Phase 1 working vision, not against this interpretation. The sketch exists to make the imagined final state legible while leaving it open to revision.
The starting point is the Phase 1 eight-object model (Event, Organization, Person, Location, Moment, Topic, Insight, Raw Input — see docs/object-model.md §1). Two evolutionary moves are visible in the existing material:
Three moves visible in the existing material
The sketch is built from existing platform material — the object model, candidate principles, directional decisions. Nothing is invented; every move traces back to a gesture already in the platform.
Moment becomes the organizing anchor
Per the directional decision in decisions.md 12-05-2026 (Moment-as-anchor) and the candidate principle in docs/candidate-principles/moment-as-experiential-atom.md, Moments are reframed as fuzzy-bordered, overlappable, nestable, expandable units of lived experience. Raw Inputs (photos, voice memos, location pings, listening history, weather, communications) become children that attach to Moments via time windows rather than being the anchor themselves. The relationship inverts: today photos are the row and metadata hangs off them; in the imagined final state Moments are the row and Raw Inputs are the data points.
Arena and Thread promoted from concepts to objects
Today the platform has the Arena concept (places transformed by what happens there, north-star.md §5.1) and the Thread concept (infinite narrative continuities, §5.2) as long-lived principles but not as Phase 1 object types. In the imagined final state both become first-class objects. Threads earn their place via the existing tag-promotion pathway in docs/object-model.md §4 (tag → frequent tag → promoted Thread, mirroring the 3+-appearances Topic Promotion Rule and the 5+-instances Expansion Rule). Arenas earn their place when the canonical layer can resolve a Location + temporal-context pair to a recognised Arena.
Insight stays soft against Moment
The Insight / Moment boundary is open in the current material (flagged in working-vision-phase-1.md §6 and docs/candidate-principles/moment-as-experiential-atom.md). The sketch hypothesises that Insight remains as a lightweight fast-path for observation / question / hypothesis / action capture — distinct from Moment because an insight is a thought about the world rather than an experience of it. But the boundary may soften further if the data shows insights are mostly anchored to specific Moments anyway. Open question.
Membrane and federation
In the imagined final state, the membrane is the architectural seam at which a user's cell meets the rest of the world. Three things pass through: capture data flowing in, public references flowing in, consensual shares flowing out — each gated by user-controlled access.
The starting points are the Membrane abstraction candidate principle (docs/candidate-principles/membrane-abstraction.md, 11-05-2026), the federated ownership material (docs/future-layers/ownership-brief.md), and the audit-log-as-mediation-primitive parked idea (project-management/maybelater.md 12-05-2026).
In the imagined final state the membrane is the architectural seam at which a user's cell meets the rest of the world. Three things pass through the membrane: