prototype

Build a small interactive terminal app around a pure reducer or state machine, with keyboard shortcuts that dispatch actions and re-render the full state each tick. Driving real edge cases by hand exposes transitions that look fine on paper but feel wrong in practice.

Render several structurally different variants on the same route, gated by a ?variant= URL search param, with a floating bottom bar to cycle between them. Keeping the existing data fetching and page context makes each variant easier to judge realistically.

No. A prototype is throwaway code that answers one question, so tests, abstractions, and polish are explicitly skipped. If a prototype needs tests to be trustworthy, it has stopped being a prototype and should be written as real code.

Use a terminal prototype when the question is about logic, state transitions, or data shape. Use a UI prototype when the question is what something should look like. Choosing the wrong branch wastes the entire prototype effort.

The validated decision is captured in a commit message, ADR, or NOTES.md, then the prototype is deleted or its logic module is folded into the real codebase. The portable pure logic module may be kept; the TUI shell and losing UI variants are removed.