vyndr/specs/MASTER-PLAN.md

VYNDR — MASTER PLAN

Single source of truth. Sessions EXECUTE against this and UPDATE it in place. Created 2026-07-31 by consolidation. Nothing built in this pass.

HOW TO USE: this supersedes ad-hoc re-derivation. Before any order, read the phase you're in. After any order, tick the item and add one line. Do not re-audit anything marked KNOWN — that redundancy is what this document exists to kill.

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0. VERIFICATION LEDGER (what was re-checked in this pass)

NOTHING was re-verified. No query was run. Everything required is already captured in 22 artifacts produced this session plus the canonical board. Per the order's own clause — "If everything needed is already in the artifacts, say so and skip verification" — this is that case.

Taken as KNOWN (source in brackets):

• Model architecture, all layers [model-architecture-recovery-map.md]
• Grade↔outcome correlations, collapse cost [full-output-grade-mapping.md]
• p_win calibration + holdout verdicts [grade-diagnostic-t0.md, pwin-recalibration-holdout.md]
• Market-relative edge inversion [grade-fix-part1-investigation.md]
• Design implemented-vs-designed, 61 items [design-vs-build-gap-audit.md]
• Surface states, orphans, waves [pre-audit-status-pull.md, incomplete-surface-triage.md]
• Resolution pipeline true state [resolution-and-clv-investigation.md, wave3-*.md]
• Tier/monetization + founder mechanism [tier-structure-pull.md, tier-redesign-spec.md, build2-review-zero-report.md]
• Sport-boundary cost [model-architecture-recovery-map.md §Phase 2]

Genuinely OPEN → carried as explicit unknowns (not verified because they need a build or a decision, not a query): sport order (Kev's call, §A2); board-reasoning gating (a/b/c, §C2); CLV flag decision (§D3); the ~70 undefined team colours (§B).

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A. PER-SPORT MODELS — Phillips doctrine: each sport is its OWN model

A1. MLB layer stack (the reference module), bottom-up

#	layer	state	note
1	Data/feeds	BUILT	statsapi free+unlimited; statcast; park; weather; probables. Settles end-to-end.
2	Similarity (comparable instances)	BUILT · NOT WIRED · NOT DEPLOYED	python/utils/similarity.py; grade path skips to season/recent averages
3	Archetypes (batter + pitcher)	BUILT · display only	classifies + renders; does NOT feed the grade
4	Variable weights	PARTIAL/ASSUMED	engine1's flat ±1.0/±0.5 deltas are hand-set, never fitted
5	Conditions (park/weather/platoon/arsenal)	BUILT · CHALLENGER ONLY	rides env_*/challenger_*; "measured, never served"
6	Bayesian inference	BUILT · NOT WIRED · NOT DEPLOYED	python/utils/bayesian.py, 320 ln, genuinely sport-agnostic math
7	Calibration	MEASURED, NOT APPLIED	isotonic qualifies on holdout (rel .1038→.0939, res .139→.123, n=119)
8	Grade ladder	BROKEN	letter is a factor index, r≈0.005, inverted (B 52.4% < C 56.9%)

The through-line: layers 2, 3, 5, 6 are built and not connected; layer 8 is connected and meaningless. MLB's fix is connection, not construction.

A2. Sport order (OPEN — Kev decides)

Proposed by readiness × clock: 1) MLB (reference, only qualifying model) → 2) CFB (has a <30-day clock; soft-market thesis) → 3) NFL → 4) NBA → 5) CBB → 6) WNBA re-attempt (abstains today) → 7) soccer (quota-blocked). Each gets the same 8-layer template. No sport is abandoned — abstention is a state, not a verdict.

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B. DESIGN IMPLEMENTATION — 61 items catalogued

BUILT-TO-SPEC 20 · DRIFTED 7 · PARTIAL 16 · ABSENT 18. Ordered wire-in: D1-A done (6 combat glyphs, boundary-blue completed, reaction primitives, READ-FAB). D1-finish done (rationale/reveal/chips modules — built, NOT mounted). Remaining: D1-close (mount — blocked on a ROW-GRAMMAR slot amendment + §C2) · D1-B (45 unwired glyphs + the 41-vs-74 archetype scope call) · S2 primitive set (movement strip, crown, disagreement axis, SPLIT) · S3 article media · The Report email + archive · Offseason artboards · team colours: only 10 of ~80 defined — the rest render honest-neutral until a real source exists.

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C. SURFACES

C1 — done: Wave 1 wiring · /compare · /record · Build-1 gate. C2 — OPEN DECISION (blocks D1-close): board reasoning is served ungated while tiers.js declares reasoning_visible:false. Options (a) gate it, (b) accept as free funnel, (c) leave unrendered. C3 — remaining: /record has no nav link (the surface that justifies the price) · /notifications · Offseason hub · /system · S3 media · /soccer (quota) · share cards (blocked by D).

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D. RESOLUTION PIPELINE → USER OUTPUT

KNOWN and load-bearing: settlement WORKS (scheduler → settleAllOutcomes + settleAllLedgers, 937+ settled, growing daily). What is unreachable is the user-output TAIL: /api/grading/resolve has no caller, and its fanout holds webPush/Telegram/Discord but no share-card step and no recap. D1 wire a trigger (or move the fanout into the settle pass) · D2 share-card generation + /notifications consent + result posts + recap · D3 CLV flag decision — clvCaptureReliable() is one env var, and the pre-registered rule stands: flip only if close_moved is a clear majority AND coverage is representative. 🔴 Never wire /api/grading/resolve as a second settlement path — it double-counts.

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E. SPORT BOUNDARY

Adding a sport is a ~10-file core edit with four silent-failure modes (MARKET_MAP → zero props; three stat whitelists → silent 400s; missing projection → universal refusal; no settled feed → grades forever). Collapse to a registry so a sport is a module. Blocks all of A2 after MLB.

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F. CHROME AUDIT — 11 items, 4 need a Desk session. Runs when surfaces are stable, not before.

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THE PHASES — 7 phases, ~18 orders

phase	orders	contents	blocks
1. MLB model truth	4	promote isotonic p_win (MLB only, WNBA abstains) · rebuild the ladder on calibrated p_win · re-adjudicate (ROI-by-grade, skew, proj-v1.1, C1 floor) · connect layers 2/3/5/6	everything model-shaped
2. Resolution tail	3	trigger · share cards + notifications + posts + recap · CLV flag decision	share cards, social proof
3. Surfaces + design lane (parallel with 1-2)	4	C2 decision → D1-close mount · /record nav + remaining surfaces · D1-B glyphs/archetypes · S2 primitives	Chrome audit
4. Sport boundary	2	registry collapse · MLB re-expressed as the first module	all further sports
5. Sport rollout	1 per sport	CFB → NFL → NBA → CBB → WNBA retry → soccer, each on the 8-layer template	—
6. Monetization finish	2	Stripe Phase-B live proof on first real signup · founder launch to the 3 existing users	—
7. Chrome audit + hardening	2	the 11-item visual sweep · credential rotation + migration-drift reconciliation	ship

Phases 1–4 and 6–7 = ~17 orders. Phase 5 = 1 order per sport (6 listed). Total ≈ 23 orders to the end state, of which ~11 are unblocked today.

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DEFINITION OF DONE

VYNDR is complete when:

1. MLB layers 1–8 are BUILT AND CONNECTED — similarity, archetypes, fitted weights, conditions and Bayesian all feed the grade; calibration applied; the ladder monotone (A>B>C, no inversion) and proven on held-out data.
2. Every listed sport is finished on the same 8-layer template, or explicitly abstaining with its reason recorded — never silently absent.
3. Design fully implemented — all 61 catalogued items BUILT-TO-SPEC.
4. Every surface built, reachable and honest — no orphans, no live-but-not-honest surface, no dead component.
5. Resolution pipeline live end-to-end — settle → share card / notification / post / recap, firing on a real settlement.
6. Sport boundary is a registry — a new sport is a module, not a core edit.
7. Chrome audit passed, logged-out and entitled.
8. The record is publishable on its own terms — CLV either trustworthy-and- representative or honestly absent; no claim outruns its evidence.

The remaining work is finite and countable: ~23 orders across 7 phases.

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STANDING LAWS (carried into every order)

Truth Law — absent beats wrong, no fabrication up or down · per-sport models, never a global engine · lookahead guard (lock-time fields only) · overfitting guard (fit one split, prove another) · never mint A's without new information · aggregate proof is free, itemized judgment is paid · one canonical founder flag · atomicity by unique index, never a count · cache-bust every post-deploy check · verify-after-write.

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9. WHAT'S ACTUALLY MISSING FOR THIS TO WORK AS A PRODUCT

The phases above say what is UNBUILT. This says what is missing for VYNDR to genuinely do what it claims. Some of it is not a build, and one of it is not fixable by us at all. Written plainly because a plan that only counts code is the comfortable version.

9.1 🔴 THE CENTRAL ONE: there is no demonstrated edge yet

Every edge measurement this session came back null, negative, or unproven:

measurement	result
served grade → outcome	r ≈ 0.005, and inverted (B 52.4% < C 56.9%)
p_win − fair_prob (3 formulations)	negative in all three, both sports, both splits
p_win alone, MLB, holdout	+0.165, p ≈ 0.07 — not significant
p_win alone, WNBA	negative — abstains
CLV / beat-close	null by guard — instrument not trustworthy
ROI by grade	likely an artifact of a meaningless letter

The product's core claim — "our read is better than the market" — is not currently supported by our own data. Everything else in this plan is scaffolding around that. Building all 23 orders and not closing this leaves a beautifully-built product that doesn't do the one thing it sells.

What closes it: not code. Sample and honest iteration. The instrument fields are ~10 days old (442 rows). At ~90 decided MLB rows/week, a defensible verdict is 6–10 weeks out. That clock cannot be shortened by engineering, and any attempt to shorten it is the fabrication this whole session has been removing.

9.2 The projection — the actual engine — is thin and unvalidated

The grade's only real inputs today are l5/l20 averages, an opponent rank, rest and usage. Similarity, archetypes, park/weather/platoon and the Bayesian layer are all built and not connected. So VYNDR is currently a recent-form average wearing an intelligence system's clothes. Phase 1 connects them — but connecting them is a hypothesis, not a guarantee. They must each prove out on held-out data or be left disconnected honestly.

9.3 A one-sport product marketed as multi-sport

MLB is the only qualifying model. WNBA abstains on its own data. NBA and soccer don't even settle — they grade into a void. Until Phase 5, the honest framing is "an MLB product with other sports in development." The site should not imply otherwise.

9.4 No customers, therefore no feedback loop

3 users, 0 paid. The founder mechanism is built and race-proven, /record exists, the gate works — and none of it has met a real user. Nothing here is validated by usage: not the price, not the tier line, not whether the locked-shell tease converts, not whether anyone wants this. The first 10 real users will teach more than the next 10 build orders.

9.5 No distribution — the biggest non-code gap

There is no acquisition path at all. The newsletter send is unscheduled, share cards are unbuilt (blocked on the resolution tail), social proof has no fuel (needs a real record), partner/affiliate links are all enabled:false. A product nobody sees cannot be validated regardless of how good the model gets. This appears in no phase above and belongs on the board as its own track.

9.6 The read isn't actionable at the last mile

Push-to-book is a teaser — no affiliate is live, so a user who trusts a read still leaves to place it manually. Bankroll guidance (Kelly) is Desk-gated. The gap between "here's a good read" and "I placed it" is unclosed.

9.7 Operational fragility

Single-box, single Redis (persistence is a Coolify setting, not app-controlled), one cron. Settlement silently covers 2 sports. Three credentials remain flagged for rotation, including a Stripe live key that transited a chat transcript. No staging environment — every verification this session ran against prod.

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THE HONEST SUMMARY

Built well: the truth infrastructure. Honest empty states, refusal paths, n-gates, the append-only ledger, the settled/live gate, the atomic founder cap. This codebase does not lie about what it knows — that is rare and it is real.

Not yet true: that the model beats the market. Not disproven either — unmeasured at adequate n, on one sport, with a projection whose best layers aren't connected.

So the finish line is not 23 orders. It is 23 orders plus a verdict from accrued data that we cannot rush — and the discipline to report that verdict honestly if it says the edge isn't there. The plan above builds the machine. Only time and honest measurement decide whether the machine is right.

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10. TO BE A REAL AGGREGATOR AND A MODEL PEOPLE PAY FOR

Kev's question: what makes this the top product, not just a finished one. The answer that matters most: the aggregator gap and the model gap are the SAME gap in two places. Fix the data breadth and both halves improve at once.

10.1 The one finding that reframes everything

Our "market" is often ONE book. MLB props are 73% single-book (2.18 audit). And proplineAdapter sends only { apiKey, markets } — no regions, no bookmakers param (:152). We take PropLine's default response.

That single fact causes four separate problems we have been treating as unrelated:

1. No line shopping — the #1 free-tier hook in this category needs many books.
2. fair_prob_lock is a de-vigged SINGLE SOFT BOOK, not a consensus. That is the ruler the model is judged against — a bent one. (Flagged as T1; never run.)
3. CLV is weak — you cannot measure "beat the close" against one book's close.
4. No steam/disagreement detection — needs ≥2 books to even exist.

So the highest-leverage unblocked action in the whole plan is a cheap API test: does PropLine return more books with a regions/bookmakers param on our tier? It is one request. If yes, it upgrades the free product, the model's denominator, and the CLV instrument simultaneously.

10.2 What a real DATA AGGREGATOR has that we don't

capability	ours	gap
Book breadth	5 MLB / 2 WNBA, 73% single-book	the category runs 10–20. Root gap (10.1)
True consensus / no-vig line	single-book de-vig	needs breadth first
Historical odds archive	STARTED — closing_captures 844k rows, lock_lines (033) new, in-grade history capped at 24 points	no full open→close series per prop. This is what makes CLV and backtesting real
Market breadth	11 live markets	the category ships 50+ (alt lines, combos, innings, quarters)
Alt-line ladders from books	we compute a ladder; we don't ingest the books'	users shop rungs
Injury / lineup wire	partial (depthChart, confirmed-vs-projected)	no real-time news wire
Player news	NewsWire on Explore	not beat-level, not per-prop

None of this is model work. It's ingestion. And it is the half competitors compete on hardest, because it is visible to a free user in five seconds.

10.3 What a prediction model people PAY for has that we don't

1. A distribution, not a point. We project a point (l5/l20 average) and take an empirical P(over). Paid-tier models simulate a full distribution per stat (negative-binomial / Poisson / MC). We already have this — projection/distribution.js computes real survival probabilities and a rung ladder — but it is proj-v1.1, ledger-only, and it lost to the champion. The asset exists; it is unconnected and unproven.
2. Opportunity modelled FIRST. In props, playing time is the dominant driver — plate appearances, snaps, minutes, batting-order slot. We carry ab_per_game and minutes as features, not as a projected opportunity with its own uncertainty. This is the single biggest modelling upgrade available.
3. Per-stat models. Hits, strikeouts and total bases have different shapes. One additive factor index across all of them is why the ladder is meaningless.
4. Matchup granularity that actually reaches the grade. Arsenal, handedness, park, weather, platoon — all built, all challenger-only, none feed the grade.
5. Calibrated probabilities with honest intervals. Measured (isotonic qualifies on MLB) — not applied.
6. A backtest harness on real historical odds. Blocked by 10.2's archive gap: you cannot backtest a price you never stored.
7. CLV as the north-star metric, published honestly. Instrument built, guard-blocked, and weak until book breadth lands.

10.4 The uncomfortable pattern

Almost every model capability above is ALREADY BUILT and DISCONNECTED: similarity, Bayesian, archetypes, park/weather/platoon, the distribution ladder, calibration. VYNDR does not have a building problem. It has a connection and proof problem — plus one genuine ingestion gap (book breadth) that starves both halves at once.

That is good news: the expensive part is largely done. But it also means no new feature fixes this. Connecting the layers and proving them on held-out data is the work.

10.5 If I had to order it for "top product"

1. Book breadth test + consensus fair line (10.1) — one API call to find out; upgrades aggregator, model denominator and CLV together.
2. Opportunity projection (10.3.2) — the biggest genuine modelling gain.
3. Per-stat distributions — connect distribution.js, prove per stat.
4. Connect the built layers (Phase 1) — each proven on held-out or left off.
5. Full odds archive — store every book's open→close; unlocks backtesting.
6. Market breadth — 11 → 50+ markets is mostly ingestion + the 4-layer wiring.
7. Then the sports rollout, on a template that is actually worth replicating.

The ordering principle: do not replicate a thin model across six sports. Get MLB genuinely good first — a copied-six-times thin model is six times the maintenance for the same absent edge.

10.6 The honest caveat on "top product"

The category's leaders are judged on one number: do their picks beat the closing line, at scale, published. We cannot claim that yet — not because the product is unfinished, but because we have not measured it at adequate n on a market we can trust. Book breadth + the odds archive + accrued settlements are what make that claim possible. Everything in §10 is in service of being able to make it — or of being able to say honestly that we can't.