The nudge we did not send: notification timing as a defect
Law 2 treats a notification fired into a moment you cannot move as a defect. We count silence as a successful outcome, and the held rate is a headline metric.
What breaks a chain
We looked at what actually interrupts a habit streak. It is almost never apathy. It is illness, a caring responsibility, a shift pattern change, a bereavement, or a flare-up of a condition the person did not choose.
Punishing all of those identically, with a counter reset to zero and a notification about breaking the chain, is a design that works well against the people it should be protecting.
Three mechanics that hold the line
Grace Tokens accrue with consistency and are spent automatically on a missed day, without being asked for. Flare Mode is user-declared and drops the target rather than pausing the chain. The Bereavement Hold suspends everything, including the coach, for a period the person sets, and nothing is lost.
None of them can be purchased. Paid streak restoration is banned in the Charter, because the moment a company sells relief from a feeling it manufactured, it has an incentive to manufacture more of it.
The measurement
Guilt-framed habit streak recovery produced a small bump in next-day return and a larger drop in week-six retention. Forgiveness framing was flat on next-day and materially better at six weeks.
That is not a moral argument, it is an arithmetic one, and it is the version of this argument that survives contact with a board meeting.
What we will not build
No "you lost your streak" message. No bottom-of-leaderboard exposure. No countdown timer on a recovery window. These are in the Charter test, which means they are not in the roadmap either — a feature that fails the build is not a feature.
What a Grace Token is, precisely
Tokens accrue at a rate tied to consistency rather than volume — roughly one per two weeks of regular activity, capped so they cannot be hoarded into indefinite immunity. They are spent automatically on the first missed day, without a prompt and without a decision.
The automatic part is deliberate. A dialogue asking "use a Grace Token to save your streak?" reintroduces exactly the loss framing the mechanic exists to remove, and turns a kindness into a small negotiation with a person having a bad week.
The notification afterwards says the chain held and does not mention what it cost. If somebody wants the detail it is in their history.
Flare Mode and the Bereavement Hold
Flare Mode is declared by the person, not detected. It drops the daily target to something achievable from a chair or a bed and keeps the chain intact. There is no evidence requirement and no time limit, because building a proof-of-illness flow into a wellbeing product is a way of telling people you do not believe them.
The Bereavement Hold is heavier. It suspends the chain, the targets, the coach and every notification except account security for a period the person sets, and nothing accrues or expires while it is on. Coming back does not require catching up on anything.
Both were added after user research rather than being designed in from the start, which is a polite way of saying we did not think of them and were told.
What the Charter forbids outright
Paid streak restoration. Loss-framed copy of any kind. Bottom-of-leaderboard exposure. Countdown timers on a recovery window. Any message containing the phrase "you lost".
These are assertions in `charter.test.ts`, which means they are not on the roadmap either — a feature that fails the build is not a feature, it is a proposal that has already been rejected.
The commercial case for at least two of them is genuinely strong. That is the point of writing the rule down before the quarter in which somebody makes it.