The False
Starts

The app directory is where a site is tried out. Routes, pages, API handlers — written to see if they work, kept if they do. Most of what you reach for, you keep. But not all of it.

Each one was created in this directory at some point in the repository's hundred and nine days, lived for a while, and was removed before the present. You will never find them by looking at what is here. They exist only in what used to be.

a reading from the fieldOne that left its reasoning behind

Take three markers standing together. The trip app once had a login of its own — a page, and two API routes to sign in and sign out, all built here, all now gone.

What stands today is not a patched version of these. It is a different thing entirely: one shared magic-link flow the whole site signs in through. The bespoke login was not a mistake corrected. It was the question — can each app carry its own auth? — asked in full, in code, and answered no. The answer is the reasoning the surviving flow was built on. You only find the question in the field.

others, by their epitaphsThe named dead

The games engine reads the same history and turns each abandoned thread into an encounter, scored by how far it got before it stopped. Forty-two of them have names. A few of the most developed:

None of these are failures of nerve. They are the ordinary cost of finding out. A repository is one of the few work records that keeps the attempts as carefully as the results — dated, attributed, recoverable. The deployed site shows you only what survived the asking.