Session 1 — Scaffold, design system, shell

• Date: 2026-09-08 · Branch: s1-scaffold · PR: #1

Goal

Stand up the repo so every later session only adds content: Next.js 16 scaffold at the repo root, the design tokens and typography from DESIGN §4, a shell (header, nav, theme toggle, footer) on every DESIGN §2 route, the contour hero motif, the test harness (Vitest, Playwright + axe, screenshots), CI jobs 1 and 2, and the project docs (README, LICENSE, CLAUDE.md, this log).

What shipped

• create-next-app@16.3.4 scaffold merged into the root (App Router, TypeScript strict, Tailwind 4, ESLint 9 flat config). Node 24 via .nvmrc and engines. Prettier with the Tailwind plugin.
• Design tokens in app/globals.css: light palette on :root, dark palette under [data-theme="dark"] only, @theme inline exposes them to Tailwind, @custom-variant dark remaps dark: to the attribute. One teal accent. Fonts via next/font/google: Source Serif 4 (display), Inter (body), JetBrains Mono (data).
• Shell: Header (name, nav, theme toggle, mobile disclosure menu with Escape handling), Footer (email / LinkedIn / GitHub / resume, "Built with Claude Code" link, last-updated from git with a VERCEL_GIT_COMMIT_SHA + build-time fallback), PageHeader, Prose, Card, Tag, Callout, Figure, PlaceholderPage, not-found. Skip link and a single global :focus-visible ring.
• app/icon.svg: the tab icon, three iso-lines of the hero field, theme-aware (replaces the create-next-app stock favicon).
• Placeholder pages for all 12 DESIGN §2 routes (three project slugs via generateStaticParams with dynamicParams = false). /resume is a placeholder page until Session 6 replaces it with the redirects() entry.
• Hero motif: components/hero/contour.ts samples a fixed scalar field (four Gaussians plus a gentle wave), traces 9 iso-lines with marching squares on a 24 px grid, joins the cell segments into polylines, and emits ~6.7 KB of SVG path data at build time. ContourField is a client island that only enables the CSS drift (useSyncExternalStore on the reduced-motion media query).
• Tests: Vitest 5 + Testing Library + happy-dom (Header component test; contour determinism, bounds and size budget). Playwright 1.63: tests/e2e/a11y.spec.ts (axe over every route in both themes, plus keyboard menu, skip link, and reduced-motion checks) and tests/e2e/screenshots.spec.ts (every route at 1280 px and 390 px). Both import lib/routes.ts.
• CI: .github/workflows/ci.yml, job 1 (lint, typecheck, test, build) and job 2 (build, next start, a11y spec) on Node 24.
• Docs: README (PowerShell run steps), LICENSE (MIT for code, content © Paige Rattenberry), CLAUDE.md (via /init, then the IMPLEMENTATION_PLAN §0 conventions pasted verbatim), this log.
• content/profile.ts: the minimum the shell needs (name, role line, email, GitHub, LinkedIn, location), each with a sources note. No other facts on the site yet.

Decisions and why

• Installed versions (checked with npm view on 2026-09-08): next 16.3.4, react 19.2.8, typescript 5.9.3 (what create-next-app installed; kept per DESIGN), tailwindcss 4.3.3, @tailwindcss/postcss 4.3.3, next-themes 0.4.6, eslint 9.39.5 (eslint-config-next 16.3.4 pins ^9; eslint 10 exists but is not what the config ships with), eslint-config-prettier 10.1.8, prettier 3.9.6, prettier-plugin-tailwindcss 0.8.1, vitest 5.0.0, @vitejs/plugin-react 6.1.1, @testing-library/react 16.3.3, @testing-library/jest-dom 7.0.1, happy-dom 20.14.0, @playwright/test 1.63.0, @axe-core/playwright 4.13.0, @types/node 24.13.3.
• Palette leans cool, not cream. The paper is #f5f4ef and the ink #1a1c1f, deliberately a step away from the warm-cream-plus-terracotta look that reads as a generated template. The accent is deep teal #0e6b6b in light and bright teal #45c7be in dark; both pass AA on their backgrounds (axe reported no contrast issues in either theme).
• The contour field is the one bold element. Everything else is quiet: hairline rules, no shadows, no gradients, 150 ms colour transitions only. The hero carries a mono "Fig. 1" caption that states what the field is and that drift pauses under reduced motion, so the motif reads as a figure rather than decoration. On mobile the field fades vertically so it never sits behind the heading; on desktop it fades in from the left.
• typecheck runs next typegen first. Next 16's PageProps/LayoutProps globals come from the generated next-env.d.ts, which does not exist on a fresh clone; CI runs typecheck before build, so the script generates the types itself.
• Mobile menu closes from the link click, not from an effect. The react-hooks/set-state-in-effect rule in eslint-config-next 16 flags a close-on-route-change effect, and the pathname-keyed alternative tried first had its own bugs (see the review notes below), so each link simply calls setOpen(false).
• content/profile.ts exists already (planned for Session 2) because the header and footer need the name and links, and the never-regress gate (e) forbids hard-coding facts in components. Session 2 extends it rather than creating it.
• Playwright forces a theme via localStorage.theme before navigation, which is exactly how a visitor's explicit choice is stored by next-themes, so the a11y spec tests the real light/dark code path rather than a media-query emulation.

Skills / tools used

• Plan mode (short plan written after reading DESIGN.md, IMPLEMENTATION_PLAN.md, the private source inventory).
• frontend-design skill when establishing tokens, typography and the shell.
• /init for CLAUDE.md, then edited by hand to carry the §0 conventions verbatim (checked with a diff against IMPLEMENTATION_PLAN.md).
• Playwright for the a11y gate and screenshots; the screenshots were reviewed in-session and drove two layout fixes (see below).
• /code-review before opening the PR. After CI went green, two more passes over the whole branch: a direct read of every file (which recomputed the palette contrast ratios), and /code-review at high effort. Both lists are under "post-PR review" below.

What Claude got wrong and how it was caught

• Working directory drift. A cd into node_modules/next/dist/docs to read the bundled Next 16 docs persisted across shell calls, and the next multi-file write failed to parse before running anything. Caught immediately by the shell error; fixed by using absolute paths.
• Prettier reformatted the planning documents. The first prettier --write . rewrapped DESIGN.md, IMPLEMENTATION_PLAN.md and SESSION_PROMPTS.md. Caught by the file-change notices; reverted with git checkout and the three files (plus CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md and the build log, where formatting must stay verbatim) were added to .prettierignore.
• Prettier also broke the "verbatim" conventions block in CLAUDE.md (turned + tests into a nested list item and reflowed the build-log template). Caught by diffing the block against IMPLEMENTATION_PLAN.md; restored by hand, and the diff is now empty.
• Two lint errors from eslint-config-next 16's react-hooks/set-state-in-effect rule (the mounted flag in ThemeToggle, close-on-navigate in Nav). Caught by npm run lint; both were rewritten without effects (useSyncExternalStore; the menu now closes on link click).
• Typecheck failed on a clean tree because next-env.d.ts did not exist yet. Caught by running the scripts in CI order locally; fixed with next typegen in the typecheck script.
• Contact page showed list bullets because the Prose descendant selector outranked the list-none override. Caught in the 1280 px screenshot; the page now uses a <dl> outside Prose.
• Contour lines ran behind the heading on mobile. Caught in the 390 px screenshot; the mask now fades vertically below md.
• /code-review (medium) found eight issues, all fixed before the PR:
  1. [&_a]:link-accent on a plain @layer components class emitted no CSS (Tailwind 4 only stacks variants on utilities), so links inside Prose and Callout were unstyled. The link classes are now @utility definitions; the built CSS was checked for the descendant rule.
  2. --container-prose: 42rem never reached max-w-prose because Tailwind's default --max-width-prose: 65ch wins the lookup. The token is now --max-width-prose, and the built CSS reads max-width: 42rem.
  3. The mobile menu keyed its open state to the pathname, so tapping the current page's link left it open and Back could reopen it. It is a plain boolean again; each link closes it.
  4. The contour path data is in the HTML twice (markup plus the RSC payload), which is true of every server-rendered node in the App Router, not just client props (verified: "Selected work" also appears twice). The reviewer's suggested restructuring would not change that, so instead the grid is 24 px with 9 levels (~6.7 KB of path data, ~13.4 KB on the wire) and the unit test caps path data at 7 KB with a comment explaining the factor of two.
  5. Playwright's reuseExistingServer on port 3000 would have run the specs against a running next dev (dev-tools badge in the screenshots, dev markup under axe). E2E now uses port 3100 (E2E_PORT to override).
  6. outline-none on the Card link suppressed the global focus ring; removed.
  7. getLastUpdated() spawned git log once per rendered route; it now runs once per process as a module-level constant.
  8. Project names had been typed into the home "Selected work" copy and the /projects meta description, against the "facts only from content/" rule. Both are now non-factual placeholder sentences.
• Floor, not ceil, for the contour grid. Changing the cell size to 24 px made the grid overshoot the 640 px viewBox and the bounds test failed. The grid now floors to fit.
• Post-PR review pass (this branch, after CI went green) found four more, all fixed here:
  1. --ink-3 failed WCAG AA in both themes. The muted-label token was 3.29:1 on light paper and 4.04:1 on dark paper, against DESIGN §8's "colour contrast AA in both themes". Axe never saw it because the only consumer, Figure's "Source:" line, is not on a page yet — so it would have shipped silently in Session 3. Now #6d685f / #979289, which clear 4.5:1 on paper, surface and surface-2 in their own theme (worst case 4.6:1 light, 4.8:1 dark); the ratios are recorded in the token comment. Every other pair in the palette was recomputed and passes.
  2. html { font-size: 17px } overrode the reader's browser font-size setting. A px value on the root element discards a raised default; every rem token then scales from 17px regardless. Now 106.25%, which resolves to exactly 17px at a 16px default (verified in the browser: computed root font size and the h1 box are unchanged) but tracks the reader's preference.
  3. Nothing enforced Prettier. The repo has format:check but no job ran it, so the "formatting is settled" guarantee that later sessions rely on was unchecked. Added as the first step of CI job 1 (a step, not a fourth job).
  4. "all 13 DESIGN §2 routes" — there are 12. Corrected here and in the PR body. lib/routes.ts matches the DESIGN §2 table exactly; only the prose miscounted.
• A second reviewer pass (/code-review, high) over the same branch found six more, five fixed:
  1. The site shipped the create-next-app favicon — the untouched 25,931-byte stock file, so every tab, bookmark and history entry for the portfolio showed Vercel's mark, on a site whose stated goal is not to read as a generated template. Replaced with app/icon.svg: three iso-lines of the hero's own scalar field, theme-aware, legible down to 16 px. Placeholder in the sense that Paige may want something else, but not someone else's logo.
  2. execSync goes through cmd.exe on Windows, which ate the git format string. With any CI variable set, git log -1 --format=%cI%n%h came back as "truen<sha>" (cmd expanded %cI%), Date.parse gave NaN, and the footer silently degraded to the build-time stamp with no date and no sha. Reproduced on this machine; now execFileSync, which never involves a shell.
  3. The footer date could be a day ahead of the commit. new Date(iso).toISOString() threw away git's local offset, so an evening commit in Pacific time rendered as tomorrow. Git's %cI string is now kept verbatim; <time dateTime> carries the real offset.
  4. format:check (added earlier in this pass) would have failed on a fresh Windows clone. core.autocrlf=true with no .gitattributes checks the tree out as CRLF, which Prettier flags, while CI on Linux stays green. Added .gitattributes (* text=auto eol=lf).
  5. Two holes in the a11y gate. The 404 was never scanned (it is a real page in the same visual system but deliberately not in routes), and axe only ever ran at 1280 px, so the open mobile menu — the only interactive markup in the shell, and the only place the nav links are duplicated into the accessibility tree — was never scanned. Both added; the spec went from 28 to 32 passing checks, all green.
  6. reuseExistingServer could serve a stale build. A next start left over from an earlier run keeps serving the previous build, so screenshots and axe results would describe old markup with no warning. Now false.
• Three judgement calls were raised rather than silently fixed; one was then implemented and two are recorded with a recommendation under "Paige's review notes" below. The home CTA now reads "Resume" instead of "Download resume".
• Not worth fixing: the footer's last-updated sha means a committed screenshot can never show its own commit, so docs/screenshots/ always trails HEAD by one. Inherent to stamping the sha; it just explains why all 26 PNGs churn on every screenshot run.

Paige's review notes

Verdicts are Paige's; the three open calls below are written up by Claude with a recommendation and the evidence behind it, so the decision is a yes/no rather than a re-investigation. Everything else in this session was either fixed or is recorded above.

Call 1 — --line at 1.32:1 on the two icon-only controls

Recommendation: leave it as is. WCAG 2.1 SC 1.4.11 asks for 3:1 on "visual information required to identify" a control. On the theme toggle and the menu button the identifying visual is the glyph, which measures 6–7:1 in both themes; the border is decoration around it, the same hairline used for every rule on the site. Raising --line to 3:1 would darken every border and rule everywhere and pull the design away from the hairline language in DESIGN §4. The narrower alternative — a heavier border on just those two buttons — would make them visually louder than the labelled CTAs beside them, which are correct at --line-2. Note this is the one place in the review where I concluded the criterion is met rather than that we should accept a miss.

• Paige's verdict: Agreed — leave it as is. The glyph is the identifying visual and the hairline is the design language; raising --line to 3:1 would change every rule on the site to fix a criterion that is already met.

Call 2 — the home "Download resume" CTA pointed at a placeholder

Implemented. The button promised a download and landed on a page reading "Content lands in Session 6 of 8", which the claims gate exists to prevent. It now reads "Resume", which is accurate today and stays accurate in Session 6 when /resume becomes a redirects() entry to the PDF — so this is one edit, not an edit and a revert. Change it back to "Download resume" in Session 6 only if the wording is worth the extra word.

• Paige's verdict: Agreed with the change. "Resume" is accurate today and stays accurate when Session 6 turns /resume into a redirect; revisit the wording only if the extra word earns itself.

Call 3 — the contour field is largely absent at 390 px

Recommendation: fold into the Session 2 hero rebuild, not now. Measured rather than eyeballed: at 390 px the SVG box is 390×661 against a 1200×640 viewBox, and preserveAspectRatio="…slice" therefore shows 31.5% of the field's width at full height — the middle third, which is the flattest, least interesting part of the field; the nested loops sit left and right of the crop. The mobile mask then fades that strip to nothing by 62% of its height. Net visible area is roughly an eighth of the field, most of it at partial opacity, while the "Fig. 1" caption still describes iso-lines and drift. At 1280 px the same element shows 100% of the width and 87% of the height, which is why it reads well there.

So this is a composition problem, not an opacity problem, and raising --contour-opacity or softening the mask would only put more ink behind the heading — the thing the mask was added to fix. The real options, in the order I would try them:

1. Generate a second, portrait field for small screens. generateContours() already takes width/height and is deterministic and pure, so generateContours({ width: 640, height: 900 }) is nearly free; the mobile SVG then has its own composition instead of a crop of the desktop one. The 7 KB path-data budget test would need to cover both sets.
2. Keep one field, change the mobile crop (xMidYMin, or a wider viewBox on small screens) so the loops rather than the flat middle are what survives.
3. Accept it — treat the motif as a desktop flourish and drop the "Fig. 1" caption below md so the page never describes something the reader cannot see.

Session 2 rebuilds this hero (positioning line, three CTAs, "Currently", skills strip), so that is the cheap moment to do 1 or 2. Doing it now would mean designing the mobile hero twice.

• Paige's verdict: Option 1, folded into Session 2. Generate a second, portrait field for small screens (generateContours({ width: 640, height: 900 })) as part of the Session 2 hero rebuild, and extend the path-data budget test to cover both sets. Do not raise --contour-opacity or soften the mask — the composition is the problem, not the opacity.

Screenshots

docs/screenshots/s1-*.png: every route at 1280 px and 390 px (26 files). Home is captured in both themes: s1-home-1280.png, s1-home-1280-dark.png, s1-home-390.png, s1-home-390-dark.png.