Drydock Development Log — 2026-06-25 to 2026-07-01

2026-07-01 · milestone

One week of Drydock work covering QuarterDeck phase navigation, build execution guardrails and verification, rigging and documentation pipelines, replan and refit idempotency, and LLM artifact parsing hardening.

This log covers Drydock work from 2026-06-25 to 2026-07-01. The week reorganizes QuarterDeck navigation around the delivery lifecycle, hardens drydock build execution and verification, and ships the rigging, Target documentation, and publishing pipelines. It closes with idempotent replanning, the new drydock refit command, and strict recovery-capable parsing of LLM artifact output.

Milestones

• 2026-06-26 — Applied Blueprint specification provenance. drydock build records applied Blueprint specification hashes in the Manifest and blocks builds when previously applied specifications change or disappear. Build needs a deterministic stale-spec guard before executing additional Manifest work from outdated Blueprint inputs.
• 2026-06-27 — drydock rigging update and drydock rigging verify. Rigging update injects the compact business-rules derivative into the built target's agent context between delimited markers and stamps provenance fields into the target metadata; rigging verify checks the injected block by content hash and flags missing required fields. Every built target project carries current business rules and traceable build provenance without manual injection.
• 2026-06-27 — Target documentation pipeline. Drydock document generation and assembly produce Target documentation Markdown and rendered HTML output as a full pipeline. Target documentation is a public Drydock capability and no longer runs against the Drydock repository documentation builder.
• 2026-06-27 — drydock publish. Drydock exposes deterministic Markdown publishing that renders frontmatter Markdown into publishable HTML, with optional PDF rendering through a local browser renderer. Whitepaper-style publishing is separate from Target documentation and requires deterministic rendering without LLM execution.
• 2026-06-29 — Shared LLM artifact guard rails. Drydock shares strict delimited artifact parsing across analyze, document generation, and survey import, rejecting malformed, noisy, or partial model output before generated artifacts are written. LLM-assisted commands need clean failure notifications and must not leave partial or invented output artifacts.
• 2026-06-30 — drydock refit. Refit scans change tickets dropped into the Blueprint changes area, normalizes ticket headers via LLM, generates Manifest story rows, and patches the Manifest without touching applied rows. Change tickets from the Commander or an external ticketing system are conformed to the Drydock build process before drydock build executes them; refit is the targeted, safe complement to plan creation.

Changes

• 2026-06-25 — QuarterDeck phase navigation. QuarterDeck navigation is grouped into Analyze, Plan, and Build sections instead of Core, Blockers, and Action Items, with phase headings showing the target name, signal flag, and phase label; the Archive section, archive controls, and archive item APIs are removed. The navigation model matches the target delivery lifecycle and keeps questionnaires, exclusions, analysis ledgers, planning artifacts, and build controls in their owning phase.
• 2026-06-25 — Existing target console migration. The existing target console is migrated to the Analysis, Plan, and Build sections, with Build visible when empty and Build Compass treated as a Plan item. Existing target-local QuarterDeck state is not regenerated by restarting the reusable web server, so the console must be migrated to match the current navigation contract.
• 2026-06-26 — drydock build execution guardrails. drydock build blocks when the Drydock source repository has uncommitted changes, creates the configured build root on first use, and renders build prompts with explicit role sections and implementation specifications as the recency anchor. Build agents write software with tool access, so the implementation source must be reproducible and the build workspace initialized deterministically.
• 2026-06-26 — drydock build verify. The verification gate records human acceptance of an implemented build step by closing the step and its child acceptance checks, which unblocks dependent build work. drydock build stops at implemented when acceptance checks exist; a deterministic review command restores the inspect-approve-continue loop.
• 2026-06-26 — Targeted rebuild control. drydock build supports --step for one selected build step and --force to reset an already built step plus child acceptance checks before rebuilding, and the build prompt forbids agent-side Git commits so Drydock owns the final build-directory commit. Operators need one-step rebuild control without advancing unrelated work, and build provenance must remain owned by Drydock rather than the LLM agent.
• 2026-06-27 — Persistence encapsulation contracts. Drydock planning treats the database specification as an interface-first persistence contract with required access patterns, persistence interfaces, architecture module ownership, and persistence stack guidance. Build agents need explicit persistence boundaries and stack requirements to avoid raw storage access and ambiguous module placement.
• 2026-06-27 — Target documentation artifact locations. Target documentation configuration remains in the Target workspace root while generated documentation Markdown, CSS, and HTML are build artifacts under the configured Target build docs directory. Generated artifacts belong in the build directory, while the Target workspace keeps durable configuration and Blueprint inputs.
• 2026-06-28 — Feature-grouped analyze outputs. Analyze directs feature-grouped Story List output, and the Commanders Chair reports Features, Stories, Questionnaires, and Blockers instead of separate Screens. The Analysis tab is the primary source of analyzed counts; the Chair must render the same shape and avoid counting analysis notes as stories.
• 2026-06-28 — Normalized discovery questionnaire answers. Analyze persists identity questionnaire proposals as answer values and normalizes stack questionnaires as alphabetized multi-select checkbox grids with empty answers. QuarterDeck renders saved answer fields and plan creation consumes answered questionnaire fields; generated metadata proposals must not appear as empty boxes, while stack choices must remain user-selected.
• 2026-06-29 — Strict plan artifact output contract. Drydock plan requires one strict LLM artifact response mode and validates the complete response before writing Blueprint, Manifest, or QuarterDeck artifacts. Failed or partial plan output must not leave an invalid Manifest or stale QuarterDeck projection in the target workspace.
• 2026-06-30 — State-preserving replan merge. drydock plan create merges prior Manifest state on replan instead of clean-regenerating: applied-specification records are restored verbatim, closed and verified block states carry forward for clean files, dirty files reset to pending, and applied Blueprint files are protected from LLM overwrite. Applied files form the load-bearing graph database; replanning when new source files arrive must not destroy evidence of what was built or force re-execution of completed work.
• 2026-06-30 — Role-based rigging compaction. drydock rigging compact selects dedicated contracts, architecture, and database compaction prompts by exact source filename instead of one generic compaction prompt. Architecture and database files need builder-facing compaction algorithms that preserve structural and persistence constraints; a single generic prompt was rejected because it did not preserve those constraints.
• 2026-06-30 — Auto-injected compact context for feature steps. Drydock auto-generates and refreshes compact architecture and database derivatives during planning and before builds, and feature build steps deterministically receive the compact derivatives as prompt context while screen steps do not. Feature-step prompts need stable low-token structural and persistence context; manual Manifest context management was rejected because it left compact injection inconsistent and prompt-heavy.
• 2026-07-01 — Artifact parsing recovery. Strict artifact parsing recovers from missing first delimiters, missing final delimiters, and pure Write-call transcripts across plan, analyze, document generation, and survey import. Claude runs intermittently emit structurally complete artifacts with wrapper defects; narrow recovery avoids failed runs without accepting ordinary prose preambles.