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Milestone 3 Complete — Making HumanityPro Easier to Understand (2025-12-23)

Milestone 3 wasn’t about shipping something new.
It was about slowing down long enough to make sure HumanityPro actually makes sense.

As I’ve been building this project, I started noticing a familiar pattern. Nothing was broken. Tests were passing. The app ran. But small questions kept showing up in the background:

  • Are we using npm or Yarn?
  • How exactly are CSS assets supposed to be built?
  • What would someone else do if they cloned this repo cold?

Those questions are easy to ignore when you’re the only one working in the codebase. They’re also exactly the kind of questions that turn into friction later. Milestone 3 was about answering them now, while the cost was low.

What I focused on

The first step was making a clear decision around JavaScript dependencies. The repository had mixed signals, and mixed signals always come back to bite you. I standardized on npm, removed the extra lockfile, and verified that Tailwind builds cleanly using that setup.

From there, I turned to documentation. Not long-term architecture notes or aspirational docs - just the basics. The things you shouldn’t have to guess:

  • What do I need installed?
  • What commands do I run?
  • Where do the built assets come from?

The README now reflects how the project actually works, not how I remember it working in my head.

Why this mattered to me

I’ve learned the hard way that projects don’t usually fail because of hard problems. They fail because of unclear ones.

Ambiguity is sneaky. It doesn’t throw errors. It just slows you down, makes you second-guess decisions, and creates invisible drag over time. Milestone 3 was about removing that drag - for future contributors, but also for future me.

Now, when I come back to this repo after time away, I don’t have to mentally reconstruct the setup. The project explains itself.

Where this leaves HumanityPro

With Milestone 3 complete, the foundation feels solid again. The tooling is explicit. The repo tells the truth. There’s less cognitive overhead just to get started.

That clears space for the next phase - building forward with confidence instead of friction. Features, refinement, and eventually the AI-powered coaching workflows that motivated this project in the first place.

Sometimes progress looks like adding things.
Sometimes it looks like clearing the fog.

This milestone was the latter.

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