Contributing with AI

If you're using an AI coding assistant to extend or modify Stackyard, this project already has the context that tool needs — load these files, in this order, before making changes:

1. CLAUDE.md — project conventions: comment style, what belongs in code vs. in documentation, and pointers to the other files below. Start here; it's short and tells you where everything else lives.
2. spec.md — the functional specification: problem statement, goals, and acceptance criteria for every feature, module by module.
3. plan.md — the architecture and technical design backing that spec: how the Go backend and React frontend are structured, storage schema, and the key technical decisions behind them.
4. tasks.md — the full phase-by-phase build history as a checklist. Useful for understanding what already exists and in what order it was built.
5. docs/STATE.md — a long, detailed running log of every work session: decisions made, rationale behind them, and gotchas discovered along the way. This is the richest source of why things are the way they are anywhere in the repo — when tasks.md or the code itself doesn't explain a choice, STATE.md almost certainly does.

For a quick pass, CLAUDE.md + docs/STATE.md + tasks.md alone will get an AI assistant (or a human) most of the way to full context; add spec.md/plan.md when the change touches product scope or architecture directly.

docs/STATE.md is this project's internal development log, distinct from this public documentation site — it is not meant to be polished reading, but it is the most honest record of the project's history.