Statuses

Status	Meaning
draft	Being designed; open questions remain.
designed	Design complete — ready to implement once its dependencies are done.
in-progress	Being built.
deferred	Parked: not abandoned, not being worked on. Never ready.
done	Built, merged, and the docs describe it.
abandoned	Won't be done.
superseded	Replaced by another initiative (superseded_by).

Ready isn't stored: an initiative is ready when it is designed and every initiative linked under its ## Dependencies is done.

Other words that work

You write	Means
proposed, proposal, exploratory, unresolved, idea, design, designing, in-design	draft
ready, design complete, design settled	designed
in-review, wip	in-progress
parked, on-hold, backlog, future	deferred
complete, completed, implemented	done
cancelled, canceled, rejected, dropped, won't do (wont-do), wontfix	abandoned
replaced	superseded

The word you wrote is kept for display — draft (Proposed) — and behaviour follows the core status. Map anything else per collection:

statuses:
  spiked: designed
  archive: done

Why work stopped

Abandoned, superseded and deferred initiatives say so at the top, in a callout under their title that Brindley keeps in step and removes when the work is reopened:

> [!WARNING]
> **Abandoned** (2026-10-07): Mermaid can't draw a word cloud.

Give the reason with set_status's reason — required to abandon, optional to supersede (the callout links the replacement) or defer. It is also kept as status_note and shown in the README's Closed list. Put the fuller story in outcome, which becomes an ## Outcome section.

Status folders

In an existing layout, a file without a status takes it from the sub-folder it's in: completed/ → done, deferred/ → deferred, superseded/ → superseded, plus any word mapped above. Front-matter always wins. Brindley moves files between folders only for a collection that opts in with folders: (see Front-matter).