The Rule Underneath, and Where It Lands

The unit rule, made visible

Frame 2 is the test in one sentence of product copy: a decision is the smallest unit anyone downstream transacts on. The cabinet maker quotes it as one line, orders it as one order, installs it in one visit. That is why it is a decision.

Drawers versus doors sits underneath it as a question, and the same question sits under four other rooms. Nobody bids it separately, so it never earns a screen. That is the whole reason the taxonomy can grow to hundreds of questions without the product getting heavier, and it is why frames 1 and 2 survived a rewrite of this page: the rule did not change when the home surface did, and nothing else in the set explains it.

This is already how the schema thinks. trade_owner, builder_engagement, decision_allowances keyed uniquely per decision, and quote line items all assume the decision is the transactable unit.

Frame 1 is deliberately the plainest screen in the set

• It is a reference view, not a to-do list. The subtitle says you never have to come in here. Making it beautiful would invite people to work in it, which is exactly backwards.
• Every row carries how it got settled, or what it is waiting on. "From your kitchen conversation." "Your cabinet maker is pricing it." "Added when you put the sink in the island." That last one is the scaffolding growing in public.
• It answers the trust question. A homeowner who talked for four minutes and had five things settled will eventually want to see the receipts. This is where they are.
• The cabinet package moved. It used to sit in Settled here while frame 2 drew it as an open decision with three unanswered questions, and FICTION.md has the cabinet maker still pricing it. One page cannot say both. It is open in both frames now, and the appliance package took its place in Settled so the kitchen still reads 5 settled and 7 open, which is the count the contents page prints in frame 3.

Home is the binder, and that is why this frame changed

The old frame 3 proposed a home screen: a greeting, one amber card, one invitation to talk, a coach note, and a composer along the bottom. It was a good answer to a question that was still open at the time, which was what home should be once decisions stopped being the unit of work.

That question is answered. HouseChalk is a house construction binder, the rooms are tabs in it, and home is the contents page. So frame 3 draws the contents page rather than proposing something else, and the only thing it adds to it is the one item with a real clock on it.

• There is only ever one clocked thing on this screen. The electrician arrives Thursday and after that it is a wall to open. That is a genuine deadline with a genuine consequence. A second clocked card on this screen would mean the first one was not urgent.
• "Nothing else is waiting on you this week" is the most important line here. An app for an anxious person has to be willing to say it, and it has to be true. Under it, the screen is not a queue at all: it is nine rooms and six other tabs.
• The decision queue is gone from home entirely. Today the journey home leads with a Next Decision card, because a decision was the unit of work. The decisions are still there, one layer down, exactly where frame 1 draws them. They are not what you open the app onto.
• It is deliberately the same screen as mockup 13's frame 1. Same header line, same rooms in the same order, same non-room tabs. If home and the contents page were drawn differently, one of them would be wrong. The clocked card is the only difference, and it is the one thing home has to carry that a contents page does not. One consequence worth naming: the clock used to be carried by a clay tint and the non-room tabs by lavender. Neither exists now — the clocked card says what closes it in words, and the tabs are cards like any other.
• The non-room tabs are six, and they were drawn as five in a fifth order. FICTION.md pins both the count and the sequence — Money, Papers & permits, People, Care, Plans & drawings, The build so far — and this frame had Plans first, Money second and no sixth row at all. The sixth row is where mockup 19's dated spine ended up once the by-when lens was cut. Naming or order drift between two drawings of one list is the tell that it has quietly become two lists, so it is fixed here rather than argued.
• The composer came off. The old frame kept a persistent "Ask or tell me anything" field pinned to the bottom. That space belongs to the nav dock now, and a phone cannot carry a docked pill and a composer without one of them becoming decoration. Going off script still has a door; it is not this screen's bottom edge.
• Counts, never fractions. Every room caption is a count of what is inside. No bar, no percentage, no "5 of 12". Same rule as the rest of the set.

Superseded: home is not one screen any more, it is two doors

What this frame concluded: home is the binder's contents page, with the single clocked item sitting on top of it — one screen, carrying both.

What superseded it: the navigation question was settled by a blind comparison (23-which-navigation, archived) and is drawn in this deck on Now and The house. There are three doors — Now · The house · Ask, and the two halves of this frame are behind two different ones. Island electrical, "Nothing else is waiting on you this week" and everything else with a clock on it is what Now is for. The rooms and the six tabs under them are The house. Read this frame top to bottom and you are reading Now stacked on The house, which is why the dock under it is selected on The house while the card at the top of it is not.

The drawing is left as it is rather than cut in two, because what it argues survives the split intact: that the clocked item is one item, that the screen underneath is a contents page and not a queue, and that a product for an anxious person has to be able to say nothing else is waiting. Those three are the reason the frame exists, and every one of them is still true — on Now, on The house, or across both. What is not still true is the sentence "home is the contents page", because the product no longer has a single home surface for that sentence to be about — it has three doors, and the contents page is what is behind one of them.

What the retrofit changed

• The page opted into body.hc-air, so it takes the promoted rhythm out of _ds/hc.css: 26/24 inside a card, 24 between cards, 40 above a section header. Frames 1 and 3 now run past the bottom of the phone. That is correct, and the four .stage overrides that used to squeeze card padding to 13/15 to prevent it are gone.
• The nav list is rendered by _ds/pagenav.js. The hand-written copy that used to sit in this file is deleted.
• The page-scoped .drow primitive is gone. It was a worse copy of .row, which hc.css now carries under hc-air. The only page-scoped rule left is .tick, the settled, open and waiting dot, which is this page's alone.
• All three frames carry the bar. They are app screens, so they get their chrome, and the scroller reserves 112px for it.

Grounded in: Cleo AI for the calm information callout under a decision, which is frame 2's pair of callouts; Tripadvisor for list rows that carry their consequence rather than a bare label, which is every row in frame 1; and IKEA Home smart's rooms for a home surface that is rooms first, with the things that are not rooms sitting underneath them.