GearBox/.planning/RETROSPECTIVE.md

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