The unbuilt: four extensions specified, none shipped
The estate has shipped one extension — the recorder. It has specified at least four more across six months, in documents of real engineering depth, and built none of them. That could be read as a backlog. It is more useful read as a body of platform findings acquired without writing code — several of them the kind that normally costs a week each to discover late. Confirmed by the founder, 8 September 2026: none of the designs below were built.
| # | Proposal | Date | Version | State | The finding it bought |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| U1 | Key Vault | 5 Mar 2026 | v0.11.12 | dev pack, 28 files, never built | AppSec staffed by what the artefact holds |
| U2 | Risk cards on extensions | 4 Jul 2026 | v0.33.42 | analysis, cards unbuilt | The read-content closure |
| U3 | The Scribe | 14 Aug 2026 | v0.33.58 | architecture brief | activeTab; the narrow remote-code rule |
| U4 | Secrets manager | 5 Sep 2026 | v0.33.65 | dev brief, re-spec of U1 | The sync budget; the enforcer test |
| U5 | The manifest as a profile | 5 Sep 2026 | — | one line, cheap | A grant declared by the thing it describes |
| U6 | The vault as extension storage | 8 Sep 2026 | — | design position | Removes U4's ceiling rather than working around it |
Why this is a section and not an appendix
The Manifest V3 platform punishes assumptions, and every brief above closed off an approach that looked reasonable before someone read the documentation. Each page states date · status · what it discovered · why it has not been built, and the claim-state discipline applies here too: a design is read at best, never measured — the first extension to ship against any of these findings is the first measurement.
The findings, promoted
activeTab over broad host permissions, the remote-code rule and its narrowness, the vault-as-storage composition, the sync budget, the read-content closure — these are true regardless of whether the extension is ever built. They are cross-linked into the architecture guide and the checklist rather than left stranded in a brief nobody reopens.
A principle arrived at twice
U3 and U4, written three weeks apart, independently converge on minimising what the extension holds — a channel instead of a key, or ciphertext instead of plaintext. Written down once as a design principle rather than left as two coincidences.