Development record

abcd has no comprehensive, deterministic system for acknowledging prior art. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.md is one hand-edited file that many agent sessions append to at once, so it conflicts on merge (the one-writer-per-file principle names a multi-writer single file as a merge hotspot), and nothing decides what qualifies for an entry: on 2026-10-30 three intents' cited papers and tools were found never credited. The product thinker proposed one file per acknowledged source in a folder under .abcd/development/, a root file regenerated only when a release is cut, and clear deterministic rules for what qualifies. The state-of-the-art check of 2026-10-30 (.abcd/development/research/notes/2026-10-30-acknowledgements-sota.md) supports all three, with one change: the root file should be a real generated file, not the proposed symlink, since Go module zips omit symlinks, core.symlinks=false checks them out as text, and GitHub and GitLab show the link path instead of the content. Related: itd-163 (citation closure and the acknowledgements mirror gate), itd-126 (one shared bibliography).