# Project Retrospective

*A living document updated after each milestone. Lessons feed forward into future planning.*

## Milestone: v1.0 — MVP

**Shipped:** 2026-03-15
**Phases:** 3 | **Plans:** 10 | **Commits:** 53

### What Was Built
- Full gear collection with item CRUD, categories, weight/cost totals, and image uploads
- Planning threads with candidate comparison and thread resolution into collection
- Named setups (loadouts) composed from collection items with live totals
- Dashboard home page with summary cards
- Onboarding wizard for first-time user experience
- Service-level and route-level integration tests

### What Worked
- Coarse 3-phase structure kept momentum high — no planning overhead between tiny phases
- TDD approach for backend (service tests first) caught issues early and made frontend integration smooth
- Service layer with DI (db as first param) made testing trivial with in-memory SQLite
- Visual verification checkpoints at end of each phase caught UI issues before moving on
- Bun + Vite + Hono stack had zero friction — everything worked together cleanly

### What Was Inefficient
- Verification plans (XX-03) were mostly rubber-stamp auto-approvals in yolo mode — could skip for v2
- Some ROADMAP plan checkboxes never got checked off (cosmetic, didn't affect tracking)
- Performance metrics in STATE.md had stale placeholder data alongside real data

### Patterns Established
- Service functions: `(db, params) => result` with production db default
- Route-level integration tests using Hono context variables for db injection
- Prices in cents everywhere, display conversion in UI only
- Tab navigation via URL search params for shareability
- Atomic sync pattern: delete-all + re-insert in transaction

### Key Lessons
1. Coarse granularity (3 phases for an MVP) is the right call for a greenfield app — avoids over-planning
2. The Vite proxy pattern is required when using TanStack Router plugin — can't do Bun fullstack serving
3. drizzle-kit needs better-sqlite3 even on Bun — can't use bun:sqlite for migrations
4. Onboarding state belongs in the database (settings table), not in client-side stores

### Cost Observations
- Model mix: quality profile throughout
- Sessions: ~10 plan executions across 2 days
- Notable: Most plans completed in 3-5 minutes, total wall time under 1 hour

---

## Cross-Milestone Trends

### Process Evolution

| Milestone | Commits | Phases | Key Change |
|-----------|---------|--------|------------|
| v1.0 | 53 | 3 | Initial build, coarse granularity, TDD backend |

### Cumulative Quality

| Milestone | LOC | Files | Tests |
|-----------|-----|-------|-------|
| v1.0 | 5,742 | 114 | Service + route integration |

### Top Lessons (Verified Across Milestones)

1. Coarse phases with TDD backend → smooth frontend integration
2. Service DI pattern enables fast, reliable testing without mocks