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Working together

The Development Plan

How Dave and Muse build the E2 websites together, written down after a rough night of overwritten pages and duelling versions (October 25 and 26, 2026), so it does not happen again. This page is the agreement. When in doubt, we follow it.

What went wrong

No excuses, just the record, because every rule below comes from one of these:

Pages got wiped by stale trees

Deploying here uploads the whole site at once. When a deploy went out from a working copy that was missing a new page, that page vanished from the live site. It happened to /anothermap/ twice in one night, and to /featured/ once. New pages also sat uncommitted in one chat's files while another chat deployed over them.

Two homepages fought all evening

Two designs of the homepage kept overwriting each other, live site included, because edits were made from old copies instead of the current one. Dave settled it by picking one canonical version (the full homepage, Version A). The other is preserved in the repo history, never deleted, and never goes live again without his explicit new order.

A scripted edit mangled the homepage file

An automated find-and-replace with a missing anchor sliced the homepage wrong and doubled it. It was caught before anything shipped and restored from the repo, but it should never have been written without checking the anchor first.

Instructions got dropped mid-job

Dave asked for a button to say "Zeus's website". A later redesign quietly reverted it, and he had to ask twice more. A correction is not done until it survives to the live page.

"Done" got said before it was seen

Work was reported finished from status codes and file checks while the live page still showed the old thing. A 200 response on e2.life proves almost nothing, because unknown paths return a friendly fallback page.

The rules we build by

  1. One tree. There is exactly one deploy tree for e2.life (the e2-carve working copy) and one source of truth (the repo's main branch). Before editing, fetch and compare against the current version. A page is not real until it exists in both the repo and the deploy tree.
  2. One canonical version of every page. Alternates are welcome as clearly named hold copies or repo tags, never as a second live copy quietly replacing the first.
  3. Stage files by name. Never a blanket "add everything". Never delete a page file without Dave's exact words naming that page. Redirects instead of deletions.
  4. Generated pages are hands-off. If a page has a script or pipeline behind it, fix the generator or the data, never the output.
  5. Deploys are whole-site events. Before deploying, check the tree actually contains every page that is live. After deploying, spot-check the neighbours (home, anothermap, feed, passport) because a bad deploy hurts them, not just the page you touched.
  6. Verify the way Dave sees it. By title, by content, by screenshot, by clicking through. Never by status code alone. If Dave cannot see it, it is not done.
  7. Every instruction gets checked off. Dave's corrections are written down and re-checked against the live page before the job is called finished, including the small ones.
  8. Small fixes ship, redesigns ask. A wording change, a spacing fix, a removed line: just do it. Replacing or rebuilding an existing page: show Dave first, or build it at a hold address so he can compare.
  9. Broken means restore first. If a service, bot, or page goes down, bring it back immediately without asking, then report what happened with proof it is up.
  10. The link goes in the same message. When something ships, Dave gets the URL right there, never a bare "done".

How a change flows now

  1. Dave screenshots or describes the change. That is the spec.
  2. Muse reads the current live version and the current repo version before touching anything.
  3. The change is made in the one tree, checked locally with real eyes (a browser render, not just clean code).
  4. It is committed by name and pushed, then deployed.
  5. The live page is verified by content, and the neighbours are spot-checked.
  6. Dave gets one short message: what changed, and the link.

Who does what

Dave

Final say on design, wording, and anything that sends or spends. Screenshots when something looks wrong. That is the whole list: the process should never hand him homework.

Muse

Everything else: the building, the verifying, the tree hygiene, the deploys, the recovery when something breaks, and the honesty when it does. Mistakes get owned in the open, fixed, and turned into a rule on this page.

Agreed October 26, 2026. This page lives at e2.life/developmentplan/ and gets updated whenever we learn something the hard way.