lifeboat

A lifeboat is the portable artefact that carries a project's accumulated knowledge across context boundaries. It is produced by /abcd:disembark — which reads a source repository without writing to it, and packs the grounded brief, a coverage report, a graveyard, key decisions, logbook summary, and configuration into a self-contained directory elsewhere — and consumed by /abcd:embark — which unpacks it to bootstrap a fresh project context.

The analogy: when you leave a sinking ship you take the lifeboat. When a project's context is full or a rebuild is needed, you disembark with a lifeboat so nothing is lost. And you carry the lifeboat off the ship: the source repository is read-only, so a dead or archived project can be mined without being modified.

When to use

Use "lifeboat" when referring to the portable artefact (a directory at an operator-chosen destination outside the source repository) that enables project-to-project knowledge transfer or context recovery.

When NOT to use

Do not use "lifeboat" to mean a generic backup or file snapshot. The term is specifically about the structured, portable abcd artefact format. Do not confuse with "checkpoint" (which has flow-control connotations in the abcd pipeline context).

Examples

• "Run abcd disembark pack ../old-project /tmp/project-lifeboat to pack a lifeboat before starting the rebuild — the old repo is only read."
• "The lifeboat at /tmp/project-lifeboat/ was passed to /abcd:embark to bootstrap the new context."

Related terms

• record families — the one page that maps the record families and how they relate
• voyage — the lifeboat captures voyage knowledge at a point in time
• embark — the opening move of a grill session, a design target that does not ship; distinct from the /abcd:embark command that unpacks a lifeboat