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Team Schedule, Two Days: Design Shotgun, Then the Status Alphabet

Yesterday: three “paste like Excel” wireframes — then “not yet” in the plan

On May 2 the /design-shotgun run targeted bulk TSV paste → preview grid → confirm apply. The CLI binary wasn’t available locally, so the skill’s HTML wireframe fallback produced three deliberately divergent UIs plus a comparison board, checked into:

docs/designs/bulk-tsv-schedule-20260502/.

In the same thread, the approved plan doc was tightened: V1 ships trust on chat — natural language for weekly recurring patterns → structured preview → Confirm — while the Excel-parity paste path keeps its full architectural sketch but moves to Phase 1.5+, so pilot week isn’t swallowed by spreadsheet UX.

Same codified workflow as DNS and Git posts: exploratory visuals can roam; the release bar gets one canonical utterance (EN + Chinese) plus one write pipeline.

AI summary

Exploration diverges; persistence converges — multiple ingress channels should still hit one domain write layer.

Today: the status alphabet, synonyms, and “next Monday” anchored to May 3

Today’s chat opened with an explicit taxonomy:

You2026-05-03

replace status with below list … In Office, WFH, WFH / PM Leave, … Training

Immediately after: train the bot to understand all statuses — remember as many variations as possible. That splits into two engineering facts: canonical enums for UI/persistence + a synonym / fuzzy layer for NL.

Then a razor-sharp acceptance case: I will be on leave next monday afternoon with today = May 3 must resolve next Monday = May 4. Scheduling without a pinned “today” is a demo; with it, it’s internal software.

AI summary

Relative dates require an explicit anchor (today/user timezone). Fixed clock in tests beats vibe-checking only in the browser.

Same workflow skeleton, two phases of the wedge

Different surface area, identical spine:

Codified workflow (reuse)
    

  1. Pain in plain language first (Excel grids, approvals, stale exceptions).
    2. 

  2. AI reads design + code; surfaces inconsistencies (bulk paste vs chat MVP).
    3. 

  3. You lock priorities in docs/design-*.md with testable wording.
    4. 

  4. Implementation is probed with small, brutal examples (status list + “next Monday”).
    5. 

  5. This MDX post captures why the two-day arc happened — tomorrow’s onboarding for yourself.
    6.

The pilot hub on the site is /schedule; the enduring spec remains docs/design-2026-04-30-team-hybrid-schedule-automation.md in the repo.