Product direction — a gradual Skylight competitor; calendar later
Date: 2026-06-22 · Status: Direction set (not scheduled)
Captures a strategic decision so neither we nor a future AI session pivots to building a calendar before chores are excellent.
Positioning
Rewhaven is becoming a family-organization hub in the spirit of Skylight Calendar — but a gradual competitor. The moat is doing chores + the token economy really well (deeper and more neurodiversity-affirming than Skylight's star-chart). The shared family calendar is added incrementally, after the chore experience is strong — not as a pivot.
What Skylight is (the bar)
A wall-mounted family display centered on a shared events calendar (often synced from Google / Apple / Cozi), plus chore charts, meal planning, lists, and a photo frame. Its core value is the calendar; chores are a secondary widget. Our inversion: chores are the core; the calendar is the expansion.
What we already have toward this
The North Star spec already anticipates the Skylight form factor at the chore
level (see Chore_app/docs/rebuild/2026-06-11-clean-rebuild-design-spec.md):
- a TV / kiosk landscape "family display" (the
tv_dashboardone-time entitlement); - a visual daily task timeline (Tier-1 child surface).
What's absent: any events calendar or
Evententity, and any external calendar sync — those are net-new.
Decision
- Chores first. Near-term work stays on the chore experience — close the domain gaps (member↔chore assignment, home-room, watch-only, per-member steps, …) and the Today P1/P2 set. This is the differentiator; it is the priority.
- The calendar is a deferred, deliberate slice. When we build it, the first
cut is an events calendar (a new
Eventdomain) — appointments / practices / birthdays — not a rebuild of the chore timeline. - Then unify + sync. Overlay the existing chores + goal deadlines onto the events calendar; later add external calendar sync (Google/Apple) and the shared display mode. Meal planning + lists are further out (parity items, low priority).
Calendar decomposition (for when it's scheduled)
| Slice | What | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Events calendar | new Event entity (title, when, who, recurrence) + month/week/agenda UI | net-new — the first calendar slice |
| Chore + goal overlay | render recurring chores (frequency + weeklyDays) + goal deadlines on the same grid | uses today's domain |
| Shared display | the landscape TV/kiosk family view | North Star tv_dashboard — planned |
| External sync | import Google/Apple/Cozi calendars (OAuth + recurrence parsing) | large; deferred |
| Meals / lists / photos | Skylight parity add-ons | low priority |
Implication
No calendar work is scheduled now. The next concrete work is chores — the SDK
domain slice (assignment / home-room / watch-only) and Today P1/P2. Revisit the
calendar (starting with the Event domain) once the chore experience is strong.