four things got done: The Program tab got the full redesign. Tap any of these to read the whole thing.
The Program tab, the screen that shows your 12-week plan and the screen that shows a single day's exercises, was the last part of the app still wearing the old look. Everything else (workouts, settings) had moved to the clean black "Brutalist" style, so the Program tab stuck out. It was also a bit dumb: it listed the plan but never told you what to do next, never showed how you did last time, and never explained why a deload week was a deload.
First I rebuilt both screens in fake-data prototypes so I could see the new look before touching the real app, and got it signed off. Then a panel of four reviewers (a product person, a designer, a serious-lifter, and a "keep it simple" skeptic) suggested upgrades and I picked the good ones. The real work shipped as six small pieces:
Where the data didn't really exist (a fake session-length, a made-up deload percentage), I deliberately left it out rather than invent numbers.
Each piece built green on its own; I scanned every change to confirm it only touched the look, not the behaviour, before merging. Then I built the whole app together (green) and ran it in the simulator with sample data to photograph both real screens, the new calendar and day view look right in the actual app, not just the mockups.
I put the public build-log website online, but it was a frozen snapshot, the diary and the green commit-graph on it only showed data up to the day I built it. Every time I shipped something new, the site would quietly fall behind unless I copied files across by hand.
Added a small robot (a GitHub Action) to this repo. Now every time I push my work, it counts up my commits for each day, grabs the latest diary, and sends both over to the website's own repo automatically. The website notices and rebuilds itself a minute later, so it always shows my newest days without me touching it. I also made the commit-graph stretch to the most recent day with activity, so brand-new days actually appear instead of stopping at an old date.
Merged it and watched the first run go green, then looked at the website's repo: the robot had pushed today's diary and a fresh commit count that now includes today (it didn't a minute before). The whole loop works start to finish.
Two annoyances during a workout. First, when you finished a set and the "How did that set feel?" popup came up, the "Log set" button was hidden below the fold, you had to swipe up every single time just to reach it. Second, when you finished an exercise, a "Set Complete" screen flashed up that still used the old plain-looking design, out of step with the rest of the app.
Proved the popup-sizing trick in the isolated prototype harness first (the Log set button sits fully clear of the home bar), got the new "exercise complete" look signed off from a prototype render, then built the real app clean for both.
Our screen-redesign process only covered making a screen look right. But a redesign is also the best moment to ask "what's missing here, or what could be better?" The Settings redesign proved that out, so I wrote the step down so we do it every time.
Added a step to the redesign playbook: an optional panel of agents that reviews a screen from different angles, product, visual, an expert user, and a skeptic who pushes back on adding too much, covering what's missing, what to add, and how it looks and feels. The panel hands back a short list, the user picks, and the chosen ideas get prototyped and built like any other change.
Docs-only change to the redesign guide; merged via PR.