Away mode, and a library of chores to pick from

[BleakMidwinter90]

Two features aimed squarely at the two moments households give up on a chore app: the empty screen on day one, and coming home from holiday.

Away mode

Tell chorely you're away for a weekend, a week, a fortnight or a month. Two things happen:

1. Chores stop being assigned to you. Obvious.
2. Your expected share shrinks in proportion to the days you were gone.

The second is the one that matters. Pausing assignment alone would leave someone returning from a fortnight away to an app announcing they were behind — both false, and precisely the accusation this project exists not to make.

Pleasingly, that falls out of the existing maths for free. Being away produces an effective weight, and the fairness scoring already understands members having different weights — so the scoring itself needed no changes whatsoever.

There's a test for exactly the case that motivated it: Ana here all month doing 20 points, Ben away for half of it doing 10. That's even, and it scores 95+. Without the scaling it scores 33 and tells Ben he's slacking.

Two edges worth noting:

• If everybody is away, assignment falls back to the whole household. Better that somebody has the bins than that they're nobody's problem.
• The weight has a floor rather than reaching zero, since a zero weight would divide by zero downstream. Someone away for an entire window barely registers either way, which is the honest outcome.

The chore library

Thirty-odd chores grouped by room — kitchen, bathroom, living space, bedroom, household, pets — with opinionated effort values and cadences.

Setting up is where households abandon these apps. The empty screen asks you to do the hardest part — remember everything your home needs — before the app has earned any trust at all. Ticking boxes is a different and much easier task, and the list doubles as a prompt for the jobs nobody thinks to write down (sorting the post, cleaning the oven, the second bin day).

Chores you already have are shown disabled rather than hidden, so the list stays a complete picture of what a home might need rather than quietly shrinking.

Templates can carry a note — "check which bin it is this week" — into the chore they create, which pairs with the notes feature from the last PR.

Verified

24 new tests (197 total), covering the fairness scaling, the assignment skip, the not-yet-started period, the everyone-away fallback, and that someone back from holiday is held to their full share again.

Lint, typecheck and build clean. All five routes and both new interfaces confirmed against the running server, zero server errors.

[chatgpt-codex-connector]

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