December 16 looked like a housekeeping session at first. Brett had cleaned up part of the repo and wanted the task headers and helper structure sanity-checked before the “real” work resumed. But once that review was done, the session widened into something more important: a rethink of what staff files were meant to be, where their truth lived, and how the document workflows should feel in the admin frontend.
After the heavy HR push, December 9 was strikingly focused. Brett was not trying to redesign half the platform at once. He wanted the admin directory to feel like an organisation chart instead of a flat list, and that meant layout work, hierarchy presentation, and image handling all had to behave like part of the same page rather than three separate chores.
Arc 6 was interleaved rather than tidy. While the DB2/calendar/email work was still unfolding in neighboring sessions, Brett also pushed hard into HR. What followed was not one clean feature but three adjacent systems growing at different speeds: Contracting Hub became the most real, the LLM Council got a visible public face before its brains were fully wired, and Policy Studio spent this period turning from a concept into a manual publishing workflow that could eventually support something smarter.
This stretch did not begin like a clean new feature arc. Brett was still recovering from the previous board-engine work, the sessions kept restarting, and the biggest discoveries came from what failed when the admin frontend tried to lean on DB2 more aggressively. Calendar requests were still falling through to the wrong handler, pagination was lying about totals, and the email system was halfway between its old account tables and a much larger mailbox-first future.
Nine of the eleven sessions between November 6 and November 19 were restarts. Brett opened nearly every session with some variation of "my session died", "I had to reset", or "the previous session was disconnected". And yet: the entire logging and notifications system was upgraded to a DB2-backed pipeline, the backdoor admin modules were ported into the main frontend, a full restaurant polling system was built from scratch, and the DataHub board engine was prototyped. The disconnects didn't stop the work — they just made the documentation and recovery strategies more sophisticated.
Late October through early November 2025 was the most technically intense period of the RABS admin build so far. The forum and messenger systems were fixed and rebuilt. The email system suffered a TLS connection crisis that affected every account. A progressive database migration from the legacy DB1 to the new DB2 began, introducing a dual-pool architecture and gradually migrating routes from the old database to the new one. And a comprehensive Comms platform — SMS, voice, video, and a full address book — was built in a single session.
The period from October 16 through 25, 2025, was defined by velocity. In ten days, the admin frontend gained a profile social system, a file manager, a scrum-style task board, and expense reports. But velocity came with a cost: previously working features kept breaking, the email system hit a TLS crisis, and the mounting feature debt meant that each new addition risked destabilizing something that had been working the day before.
If the first week of October was about building a solid Vite foundation and the second week's start was about plugging in features, the rest of that second week was about discovering that the infrastructure didn't work. The new logging and notifications system — designed as the single entry point for all admin events — was non-functional. The settings pages had broken API connections. The email system had a SQL bug that prevented message caching. And nearly every session was interrupted by a system crash, internet glitch, or connection reset.
October 6 through 8, 2025, were about plugging real functionality into the Vite-based admin frontend. The HR page had layout problems left from a migration. A new AI assistant called Reggie needed a full chat interface with folders, model switching, and export features. And all three settings pages were broken — their API connections to the database didn't work, and their UI was a demo mockup that needed a complete redesign.
On October 1, 2025, Brett decided to change the method of construction for the RABS admin frontend. The compiled dist/vendor-template pages that had served the project since its earliest days were being scrapped in favor of source HTML under src/html, Vite-built static/multi-page output, and modular per-page JavaScript loaded on demand. Over five turbulent days — punctuated by context window overflows, terminal crashes, and the discovery that an entire night's work had been destroyed — the admin frontend was restructured from the ground up.