#+TITLE: Proposal: promote the "subproject" pattern into the claude-r #+SOURCE: from home #+DATE: 2026-07-15 23:24:07 -0500 Proposal: promote the "subproject" pattern into the claude-rules layer. WHAT WE DID (in home, 2026-07-15) We named and built a pattern for what happens when a standalone project is consolidated into another project. home absorbed nine former projects on 2026-06-11 (danneel, finances, jr-estate, kit, health, documents, clipper, elibrary, philosophy). We now call each folded-in unit a "subproject": a former standalone project that lives as a subdirectory, shares the parent's .ai/ scope (one session, one toolchain), but keeps its own files, assets, and history self-contained under its subdir. The pattern has four parts: 1. Vocabulary — parent project, subproject, consolidation (the process), subproject archiving. Terminology so we can talk precisely about where a subproject's documents/assets live and archive them cleanly. 2. Subproject brief — a read-first orientation doc at /-brief.org (situation, current state, reading list, and for deep ones cast/timeline/key-facts-with-verify-flags). The parent's notes.org holds a thin index + a read-first rule + pointers to urgent items only, never a copy of subproject substance ("one fact, one home"). 3. Lifecycle criteria — when to CREATE a subproject (consolidate: domain fit, low independent cadence, shared-scope safety re: privacy/remote posture, no independent collaborators), and when/how to ARCHIVE one cleanly (terminal state -> move the self-contained subdir to /archive/, reconcile pointers/links/tags, manifest note). 4. Instrumentation — a use/miss log, metrics weighted toward Craig-caught errors over self-report, review folded into task-audit, and a falsifiable kill criterion. WHY IT'S GENERAL (not just a home thing) Consolidating a project into another drops what the former project's own startup used to auto-load (its full depth), so sessions start cold and re-read files. That failure recurs whenever ANY project folds into another. The pattern also gives consolidation and archiving a named, repeatable shape, and the self-contained-subdir rule is what makes archiving a move-plus-pointer-reconcile instead of an excavation. THE PROPOSAL Promote this to a rulesets claude-rule (e.g. claude-rules/subprojects.md): the vocabulary, the brief convention, the parent-vs-subproject content criterion, and the create/archive criteria. Any parent/hub project would then inherit it. home's .ai/subprojects.org (attached next) becomes the local instance/index under the general rule. It's a companion to working-files.md (in-progress artifact layout) and docs-lifecycle.md (formal-doc lifecycle) — same family, different scope: this one governs whole-subproject orientation and lifecycle. Attached: the home instance .ai/subprojects.org as the reference draft to adapt. Apply your value gate; this is a proposal, not a synced-file edit.