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Directions Explored

Governing: ADR-0018 (Considered Options).

Chosen: charm-web wholesale (B)​

The 2026-07 "Redesign with Bubbletea TUI" exploration produced screens for every view plus the wizards and the MCP OAuth consent surface, in both themes — a complete product decision, adopted wholesale (ADR-0018). Day mode is the default web posture; night is the terminal-dweller parity theme.

Explored and rejected​

  • (A) Keep the Operator/brass language — the ADR-0016 system (parchment, brass, oxblood; Zilla Slab display over IBM Plex). Rejected: the charm-web package is the product decision, and nobody uses switchboard yet — there is no migration constraint to honor. Its architecture (tokens, contrast gate, embed.FS, HTMX/SSE) survives; its skin does not. The published design record keeps a frozen copy of the brass tokens (docs-site/static/design-tokens/) so the docs site stays stable while the app moves.
  • (C) Hybrid: brass day + charm night — rejected as two half-languages; trust/state colors and component shapes would fork per theme, doubling every design decision.
  • Terminal-window chrome around the app — the TUI dialect of the design system frames everything in emulator chrome. Rejected for the app: on a web surface, a framed window means a literal embedded terminal. The browser dialect is borderless; content sits on the grid canvas.
  • Icon font / SVG icon set — rejected; the language uses typed Unicode glyphs, which render in the same mono faces the text uses and need no extra assets.
  • Overlay modals (status quo interaction) — replaced by full-page wizards with server-side step state (SPEC-0015 REQ "Wizard Interaction Pattern"); overlays remain only for the todo drawer and transient toasts.