Backlog

docs/backlog/ at a repo root holds work that is real but not being done now: a defect a change did not introduce, drift with no user-visible symptom, a fix whose blast radius exceeded its value, an idea worth keeping. One file per item. It is the maintainer's own list — it never gates anything and never reaches a contributor.

The directory path is fixed, so every invocation in a repo reads and writes one predictable store.

Git only. The lifecycle is expressed in Git — git rm to close an item, branch detection before writing, staging and committing the file. Outside a Git repository, say so plainly and stop; do not improvise an equivalent in another VCS.

Item format

docs/backlog/<slug>.md. The slug names the defect, not the file it lives in (reopen-fallback-ignores-frontmost.md), so it can be cited from a commit and dedupe is a filename check.