Historical implementation plan and status

This page preserves dated engineering notes and verification evidence from prior work. It is not a live status dashboard, current build report, or release-readiness claim. Confirm current behavior from the checked-in source and the latest release information.

File-backed foundation: Select and reopen a workspace, index ordinary records, edit apps and owners, connect websites, and expose files. Validate persistence and conflicts.
Marketing editor: Configure social accounts, write articles and social originals, customize account versions, attach media, copy content, and record manual publication.
Relationships and external edits: Connect articles and social posts, resolve published links, show account previews and guidance, observe changes, and verify end-to-end workflows.

The product specification remains the acceptance authority. This file describes the implementation sequence; it is not a release-readiness claim.

Implementation update — 2026-11-10

The current source now includes the SocialKit connection, account activity, Bluesky mention, and local scheduled-delivery workflows. API delivery uses a device-local journal to authorize intents, refreshes credentials near expiry when supported, preserves immutable scheduled payloads until the user explicitly reschedules with the current draft, and leaves ambiguous outcomes for manual reconciliation. Workspace account records distinguish editable display name/handle/profile URL and avatar from the verified provider recipient identity. Saved workspace avatars are used by account and composer previews. See Social connections and local delivery and the GUI and CLI capability matrix.

This update reflects the checked-in source and documentation as of this date; no build, automated test, or live provider check was run for this documentation pass. The acceptance evidence below is dated 2026-11-06 and remains historical rather than a verification of these later social workflows.

Current scope adjustment: Local App release/version tracking remains disabled in the UI, including persistent version summaries, release views, and content-to-release links. The optional App Store tab shows current remote ASC status and release notes on demand; it is not a local release tracker. Existing release files and legacy content references are preserved but are not loaded into the interface.

App Store Connect CLI extension: The App detail includes an optional App Store tab. Users can locate asc, link an ASC app record, preview and selectively apply its name, bundle ID, and listing URL, read release/review status and recent submission history, pull localized What’s New text into an editable copyable draft, and generate a local release-note draft from a user-specified git reference. ASC operations are read-only; no metadata upload, review response, or submission is exposed. This is separate from the disabled local release tracker. The integration uses the user’s installed CLI and existing authentication, and stores only the ASC app ID in the workspace. Debug and Release builds passed on 2026-11-10; live ASC interaction and UI behavior have not been exercised.

Acceptance review — 2026-11-06

The code implements the three milestone slices, but the release gates in PRODUCT_SPEC.md are not yet all verified. The checks below separate source and automated evidence from the workflows observed in the running app.

The workspace is file-backed and its editor uses revision checks. Related content saves preflight a batch and attempt rollback after an ordinary failure. This is best-effort recovery, not a crash-safe transaction or an atomic compare-and-swap against independent writers. Security-scoped bookmarks are stored in the app’s Application Support plist, with a one-time migration from the earlier defaults storage. An earlier ad-hoc signed sandbox build stalled in _libsecinit_appsandbox; a fresh build on 2026-11-06 carried the expected sandbox and bookmark entitlements and launched to the Welcome screen. Its native workspace chooser remained inactive in the CUA session, with Create Workspace disabled, so selecting a fixture, persisting a bookmark, and reopening/relinking remain unverified.
App, release, website, account, content, variant, media, preview, manual status, search, and file workflows exist. Rename and Trash are available for workspace descendants except store marker files; references to renamed or trashed asset paths are not rewritten. Search indexes record metadata rather than file contents. Category read failures now surface as actionable workspace load errors. The social composer has a compact Edit/Preview layout and warns when its linked source is unavailable. The running app visually confirmed the compact Edit/Preview layout and nonblocking over-limit warning. Blog content supports multiple app associations in the editor; model selection and persistence are covered by a focused test, while the updated control still needs live interaction verification. The Files view has manual refresh as a fallback for external changes.
The focused macOS unit suite passed: 32 tests in 2 suites, covering compatibility, revisions, batch preflight/rollback, malformed records, relationships, category read errors, social destination eligibility, change observation, Files-browser path canonicalization, workspace file-operation scope, unique Codable website-link IDs with legacy decoding, import copy/no-replace behavior, symlink and destination rejection, workspace-load rejection of record paths outside the workspace, multi-app article associations, and preservation of disabled, ownerless, unresolved, and missing account references. A deterministic external-write interference test confirms partial rollback reports the affected path and preserves the outside writer’s bytes. An explicit watcher test confirmed atomic Markdown and image replacements trigger workspace change notifications. A composer-state test also covers account eligibility refresh without a false dirty state. A fresh isolated unsigned Debug build and test-target build passed. The unit-test bundle from that same build was run directly with xctest: all 32 tests in 2 suites passed. The UI-test target and runner built, but both unsigned and ad-hoc signed xcodebuild test attempts failed before launching the app: testmanagerd timed out while enabling automation mode, and Xcode reported that the UI-test runner failed to initialize. No app-under-test process appeared; this is a test-environment/automation failure, not an observed app test failure.
In the running app against the explicit disposable fixture at /tmp/indie-dev-buddy-ui-workspace, observed checks covered the article/source relationship, three-account previews and effective length guidance, adding the source URL to preview text, saving an account-specific branch without changing the original or sibling branch, per-account media selection, manual publication state and URL, copy confirmation, unsaved-navigation cancellation, and external-edit conflict resolution. Returning a destination to the original body and creating a fresh custom branch left the old variant file intact. App icon import/save was verified. A staged icon plus externally edited app record produced the new Keep My Changes / Reload Workspace Copy choices: keeping local changes updated the expected revision and a later save succeeded while retaining the external description; reload discarded a local draft and showed the newer external repository URL. Source review found that website page identity was derived from editable fields, which gave same-site links duplicate SwiftUI IDs; IDs are now persisted and unique, with legacy records still decoding. In a cloned fixture, the running updated app saved three distinct product/support/privacy pages for Fixture App B and a product page for Fixture App C, both referencing the same website record. Renaming and saving Fixture App C in the updated app retained its page link after the save and snapshot refresh. Release Markdown notes and an imported release asset were saved and confirmed on disk. The valid fixture image loaded in the release editor; Copy Image followed by Paste Image created a second release asset. The release unsaved-navigation prompt preserved a local draft after choosing Keep Editing. The Files browser opened the fixture Inbox and created, renamed, and moved a disposable folder to the Trash. It also created, renamed, and trashed a disposable folder under Content; the folder disappeared from the listing. A native file-picker import attempt stalled before completion. The Files browser now uses SwiftUI’s file importer with generic data types and copy/no-replace handling. The updated app opened the fixture Inbox through an accessible folder button. During the latest picker attempt, disposable .txt and image files in /tmp appeared in the panel, but its Open button remained disabled and the panel was inactive in the CUA session; no file was imported. Unit tests cover the copy and safety rules, while native picker completion remains unverified. A later Files browser check against the updated build also confirmed /tmp workspace paths resolve correctly when macOS reports the root as /private/tmp; the browser still excludes symlinks. Drag-and-drop media and keyboard/accessibility behavior remain unverified. An earlier Paste Image attempt with an unsupported clipboard item produced its actionable error. Content media files can remain unreferenced if a user cancels after importing them; cleanup is deliberately not implicit.
A further updated-build UI check renamed and saved a newly selected app record while the workspace snapshot was refreshing; the record remained editable, and its website page remained visible after save. This covers the transient missing snapshot entry that previously caused a false revision conflict.
The updated running app’s Social Accounts list showed the owner under each account. Its owner filter offered identity and app owners, and filtering to Fixture Person showed only the account assigned to that identity.
Workspace refreshes carry a generation into the open content editor. It checks the record, original body, and account-variant revisions; clean drafts reload after external changes, while dirty drafts retain local edits and show Keep/Reload choices. Running-app verification against /tmp/indie-dev-buddy-website-links-fixture confirmed that an atomic external Markdown edit updates the open article while keeping both the Marketing Content section and article selected. An external edit with a local draft open showed the conflict choices; Cancel kept the local draft and editor open. Root navigation and selected content are persisted through app storage so a refreshed content view recovers the active workflow. The later explicit Keep My Local Changes choice allowed a subsequent save to replace the fixture’s external version.
A running-app composer check selected a customized Threads account and entered 650 characters. With the linked article URL included, the preview reported 691 / 500 and showed its warning. Save Changes persisted all 650 characters to the account’s variant file, and Copy Text reported success; the clipboard contained the 691 character effective text ending in the article URL. The same compact composer displayed its Edit/Preview switch when its available width was below the wide layout threshold.
In the running app, a valid external edit to the Example App JSON changed its sidebar name without restarting. A malformed replacement produced an expanded, file-specific workspace issue with the decode error; restoring the valid record cleared the issue.
A running-app eligibility check disabled a referenced Threads account in the fixture. It left the post’s destination file intact, removed the account from the selected count, and showed an unavailable-account warning. Re-enabling it made it available again without silently reselecting it.
The social composer now reconciles open selections when account eligibility changes: an account that becomes unavailable is removed from selected state, remains in the preserved destination set, and does not by itself make a clean draft appear dirty. This behavior is covered by the running-app check above and by a focused unit test.
In the running app, renaming and saving the article retained its source relationship to the social post. Moving the article’s folder while the workspace was open also preserved the relationship; opening the article navigated to its new folder and loaded its title and body.
A running-app check found that the social composer could cause its HSplitView detail pane to collapse. The detail editor now requests a 520-point minimum width. In the updated isolated build, creating a new social post opened the composer with its title, shared-text editor, media controls, eligible destination accounts, preview guidance, and Save Changes action visible. The focused 29-test unit suite passed after this fix.
Review of Nov 5 live-refresh fixture crash reports found repeated SwiftUI BindingOperations.ForceUnwrapping traps while the content editor was mounted. The non-social editor no longer projects a binding through optional edited state; it uses a stable binding that falls back to the selected record during reload transitions. A fresh Debug build passed. Xcode’s scheme test action stalled during test-log finalization without producing a result bundle, but its newly built unit-test bundle ran directly with xctest: all 29 tests in 2 suites passed after the binding change. The Xcode bridge then launched the project app and reported its process running. The desktop’s stale crash dialogs exposed an XCTest system prompt requesting Touch ID or a password to enable UI automation. I did not provide or bypass those credentials; CUA requests for Indie Dev Buddy time out, so the crash and reload transition could not be rechecked live.
Generated workspace AGENTS.md includes required fields, examples for each record type, ID-based relationships, path bases, and external-edit/conflict guidance. A guide read from the older disposable UI fixture contains only the original brief instructions; existing workspaces are not silently rewritten. The generation contract is checked by generatedWorkspaceGuideDescribesCurrentPathBasesAndSchema.
Still required for full acceptance: live crash/reload/navigation verification after the optional-binding change; the signed sandbox workspace selection, bookmark persistence, restart, and relink workflow; externally edited image refresh; native file browser import; record-folder and referenced-asset operation checks; drag-and-drop media; and the full empty-state, keyboard, and accessibility pass. Markdown refresh in the open clean and dirty editors and article relationship stability after title/folder changes are verified as described above. The build emitted Xcode’s App Intents metadata-skip warning because the target has no AppIntents framework dependency; it did not prevent the build or test run.