Development record

2026-08-31 — The abcd lab convention: experiments run in throwaway snapshots at the operator level, never inside or committed to the repo. Home: `~/.abcd/lab/<timestamp>-<source-sha7>/`, keyed by mint-time timestamp plus 7-char source-root sha — several labs may share one baseline, and the directory must exist before the first mutation; this diverges from the voyage log's root-sha keying (voyage keys one event per source state; a lab keys a session whose identity is its intention), and the divergence is stated rather than claimed as fidelity. Layout: `INTENTION.md` (question, hypothesis, measures, STOP conditions — written before any mutation), `snapshot/` (a throwaway clone mutated freely; records mint freely inside it and never promote — harvests re-file into the real corpus), `transcripts/`, `harvest/`, `amendments.md`, plus an append-only `~/.abcd/lab/index.jsonl` registry (id, source sha, status, harvest pointer). DISCARD ends the lab session, not the lab home: the snapshot's live tree is archived to `snapshot.bundle` and deleted, and every mutation session inside a snapshot ends with a commit inside the snapshot before archiving, so minted records and the snapshot's own `.abcd/` tier survive in the bundle; `INTENTION.md`, `transcripts/`, `harvest/`, and `amendments.md` survive discard, and a later lab clones its base world from an earlier lab's bundle. The real repo is touched only when a harvest files records through normal ceremony, each carrying `found_during: lab-<id>` provenance and the lab's base sha. Harness-isolation preflight re-runs per lab against that lab's own snapshot world. Hand-maintained until a lab verb exists; the verb is a capstone candidate.