Seed Packet

Planting a Seed in DandyLine asks a Gardener to make several decisions in one moment:

• Which Vault? Personal, Grove, Legacy, Journey, Roots, Milestone
• When does it bloom? A date, an age, a milestone, a location
• Who is it for? A named recipient, a Grove, an Open Claim, themselves
• Which Bloom Mode? The reveal experience (timeline carousel, page-flip, etc.)
• Who's the Guardian? If applicable

That's the right amount of intention once a Gardener has decided. But it's friction at the moment of inspiration. The instinct “I want to keep this” arrives in seconds; the answers to those five questions sometimes take days.

The Seed Packet preserves the instinct without demanding the answers. Capture now, decide later. The brand promise of patience extends inward — even the Gardener gets to be patient with themselves.

What the Packet replaces

Every other capture app has some version of this: Apple Notes' “Quick Note,” Notion's “Inbox,” Bear's “Drafts,” Day One's “Today.” They all default to a generic productivity vocabulary. DandyLine's version sits inside the brand world — it's a Packet, not a folder. It holds Seeds, not files. The Gardener tucks Seeds in; they don't “save” them.

A Seed in a Packet sits before the canonical lifecycle in product-seeds.html. It is pre-Sealed — the planting ritual has not happened yet.

The pre-Sealed state

This is a new lifecycle state introduced with Seed Packet. A Seed in this state has:

• Content (photo, text, voice, video) — captured
• Capture timestamp — when it was tucked into the Packet
• No Vault assignment
• No bloom date or trigger
• No recipient
• No Guardian
• No Bloom Mode

When a Gardener moves a Seed from the Packet into a Vault (via the Plant flow), the Seed exits the pre-Sealed state and enters the standard Sealed → Bloomed → Drifting → Composting → Released lifecycle. The Seed Packet is not a stop on that journey — it's an entrance ramp before it.

What this means for storage and integrity

Pre-Sealed Seeds are content the Gardener has committed to keeping but hasn't committed to a recipient or timeline. They should be encrypted at rest the same way Sealed Seeds are. The “one quiet check” (content moderation pre-encrypt) should still run at capture, before the Seed enters the Packet — so a Seed never sits in the Packet unscanned.

Four real moments where a Gardener reaches for the Packet instead of the full planting ritual:

Across all four: the Gardener's energy at capture is different from their energy at planting. The Packet honors both.

The Packet icon

Lives in the Plant action's neighborhood — visible without being loud. Conceptually a small pouch or paper packet (the kind real seeds come in). Final visual is a design pass — flagged in Open Questions.

A small numerical indicator shows how many Seeds are tucked inside (e.g., Packet · 7). This is informational, never alarming. No red dot, no urgency badge.

Inside the Packet

Opening the Packet reveals an un-planted Seed list, sorted most-recent-first. Each row shows:

• A small thumbnail or first-line preview of the content
• Capture date (e.g., “tucked 3 days ago” — gentle, not legalistic)
• Media type icon (photo, voice, text, video)
• A “Plant this” button that drops the Seed into the Plant flow with content pre-filled

The Gardener can also delete a Seed directly from the Packet if they decide not to keep it after all (with the same compost / release ritual that applies elsewhere — never “Trash,” never “Delete” in raw form).

The brand voice in the Packet

Empty state copy when the Packet has no Seeds: “Nothing tucked away right now. Capture something when the moment comes — we'll hold it for you.”

Filled state header: “7 Seeds waiting to be planted.” Never “7 unfiled items.” Never “You have 7 drafts.”

Three ways a Seed reaches the Packet:

① Plant FAB → “Plant later”

The Plant FAB opens the standard Plant flow. At the top of that flow, alongside the Vault picker, an alternate path: “Not ready to decide? Tuck it in your Packet.” One tap drops the captured content into the Packet without forcing a Vault choice.

② Plant flow → “Save to Packet” escape hatch

If a Gardener starts the Plant flow but realizes mid-decision they don't have an answer (or a Vault, or a recipient), they can step out of the flow into the Packet without losing the captured content. The escape hatch is always available — never punishing the Gardener for indecision.

③ Direct entry from the Gardener Menu / Garden Almanac

The Packet is also accessible from the Gardener Menu (settings hub) and from the Garden Almanac, where a Gardener can browse all their un-planted Seeds at once. This is the slower path — for when the Gardener returns specifically to sort.

The Weather Hub (HW#41) is where DandyLine surfaces all time-sensitive signals to the Gardener. The Seed Packet is one of those signal sources — but a quiet one.

Weather prompts the Packet may generate

• “You have 7 Seeds in your Seed Packet — ready to plant?” — count-based, surfaces when Packet count crosses a threshold (TBD)
• “A Seed has been waiting in your Packet for a while.” — time-based, surfaces when a Seed has sat un-planted for an extended period (threshold TBD)
• “Want to sort what's in your Packet?” — soft, occasional, never insistent

Tone discipline: every Weather prompt about the Packet must read as an invitation, not a chore. The Gardener should never feel scolded for having Seeds in there. If the brand voice for Weather drifts toward productivity-app urgency, the Packet prompts will be the canary.

Action button behavior

Each Weather item about the Packet has an action button that takes the Gardener directly into the Packet view. Per HW#41 spec, this is consistent with how all Weather signals work — they don't just inform, they navigate.

The Packet stores real content — photos, video, voice. It costs storage. The honest framing of how the Packet behaves on storage and limits is still in development. Working principles:

Working principles (subject to revision)

• The Packet counts against the storage cap. Content is content; pretending otherwise creates a loophole. (Likely answer — confirm with Josh's storage cost framing in Section M of QUESTIONS-FROM-ASHLEY.md.)
• No Seed-count limit — storage is the only ceiling. The friction in DandyLine is intentionality at planting, not a cap on capture. The Packet has no Seed-count cap; a Gardener might hold 5 Seeds or 500. Because a photo Seed, a 2-hour-video Seed, and a short voice note take wildly different space, capacity is measured in storage (GB), not Seed count. The Garden Almanac surfaces remaining storage clearly. (Reframed 2026-05-07 per Ashley's §08 review — the original "200 Seeds" framing read as a count cap; corrected to storage-based.)
• Seeds in the Packet do NOT drift toward Compost. The Compost lifecycle applies to Bloomed Seeds, not pre-Sealed ones. Un-planted Seeds wait as long as the Gardener needs.
• If the Gardener hits the storage cap with Packet Seeds in tow, the same upgrade-or-press prompt fires (per H1 in QUESTIONS-FROM-ASHLEY.md). Press doesn't quite apply to un-planted Seeds though — needs a thought pass on what the storage-cap moment looks like for un-planted content.

Seed Packet introduces or modifies behavior on these existing surfaces:

• product-seeds.html — add the pre-Sealed lifecycle state to the canonical diagram and state list
• ux-planting-flow.html — document the “Plant later” branch and “Save to Packet” escape hatch as canonical paths
• Weather Hub (HW#41) — register Packet-related signal types (count threshold, time threshold, sort prompt)
• Plant FAB — add the “Plant later” alternate path on top of the standard Plant flow
• Gardener Menu (settings hub) — add Seed Packet as a top-level menu item with helper text underneath per the Label Pattern guideline
• Garden Almanac — surface Packet count and recent activity in the Gardener's overview view
• brand-guide.html — Seed Packet vocab note ✅ added 2026-05-02
• CLAUDE.md — vocab table updated with Seed Packet ✅ added 2026-05-02
• Onboarding flow — when introducing the Plant action, mention “or tuck it in your Packet” so first-time Gardeners know the path exists

Tracked in HW#201. Resolution pass 2026-05-06 — see biz-dev-decisions-log.md 2026-05-06 entry. Q1–Q6 LOCKED. Q7 (Farmers Market tie-in) MOVED to biz-dev-future-builds.md. New question raised on §08 storage framing.

New question raised in 2026-05-06 review