Streaks that cannot become a stick, plus household history

[BleakMidwinter90]

Streaks are the standard gamification lever in this category — Sweepy, ChoreUs and Chore Wars all lean on them — and they are almost always a punishment device: miss a day, watch a number you'd been growing reset to zero, usually announced by a notification.

That's precisely the tone chorely exists to avoid, so the definition here is deliberately different.

The rule

A day contributes one of three things:

• counts — work was done. The only thing that grows a streak.
• bridges — nothing was ever asked of you. Being given no chores on Tuesday is neither an achievement nor a failure.
• breaks — work was due and not done.

Today never breaks a run, because the day isn't over. Someone opening the app at 9am has not yet failed at anything.

Two real corrections, both caught by tests

An infinite loop. With nothing ever due, every day in the past counted as "kept", so the backward walk never terminated — the test suite hung for a full five minutes before I killed it. The walk is now bounded by the first day the person did anything, before which there's simply no record.

A subtler one, and the more interesting. My first rule let empty days increment the count, so two days of work either side of a quiet week reported "5 days in a row". The failing test was technically my test being wrong — the code matched my documented rule — but the right response was to change the rule, not the assertion. In an app whose entire pitch is honest accounting, a streak number that inflates itself is a particularly bad lie. Empty days now connect a run without padding it.

History

• Effort per week, last eight weeks. Single series, so no legend — the heading names it — and no categorical palette to validate; the check that applies is contrast against the surface, which the brand pine clears in both themes. Empty weeks are drawn as empty rather than omitted: a chart that silently skips quiet weeks compresses time and makes a fortnight of nothing look like steady work. The same data is exposed as a screen-reader table.
• Chores the house keeps skipping. Framed as information about the chore, never about a person. A job skipped two times in three is usually a job the house doesn't need, and noticing that is far more useful than nagging anyone to do it. Requires at least two skips and a 40% rate, so one skip out of one stays noise.

Verified

156 tests, lint and typecheck clean. Checked against the running server: eight correctly bucketed weeks (Monday-anchored, confirmed against the calendar), accurate per-bar tooltips, and a streak reading "10 days running" from the seeded history.

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