---
date: 2026-06-17
phase: 3
headline: Back-half plan locked, scope-discipline holding, pre-vacation pivots from YAM meeting
---

## What we did
- **Morning low-energy / brain-fog state** — self-diagnosed as the "aimless when advisor priorities diverge" pattern. Doubled down on the plan from Jun 16-17 rather than replanning.
- **Locked the back-half sequencing**: now → ~Jul 1 single-arm core · ~Jul 1 → mid-Jul bimanual integration + derisk · mid-Jul → Aug 17 bimanual scale-up + final. Nice-to-haves delegated to others. 1hr/day Onshape track starts now.
- **Refined the Sergey collaboration**:
  - Sergey agreed with single-arm-first, but pushed to start pipeline derisk NOW with data collectors using the same recording script
  - **YAM meeting surfaced**: collectors are NOT programmers. Async Loom-and-go won't work — they need an in-person Tue Jun 23 onboarding session.
  - Pre-vacation pivot: write copy-paste-friendly non-programmer instructions + verify space-mouse teleop works (collectors prefer it).
- **Weekend method-diagram task captured** in vault: detailed architecture-flow figure (rotation + gripper heads, pre/post-fusion concatenation, feature shapes at each stage). Reuse old Inkscape file as starting point.
- **Pitch evolution**: new candidate line — *"3D reasoning for robotics throws away pretrained 2D features. PARA brings 3D actions to the 2D features instead — action selection on per-pixel evidence."* Composes with the Jun 10 binding framing as opener-vs-mechanism.
- **Ideas parked**: Pandas calibration → DROID pretraining (or Pandas → YAM transfer) — captured as post-paper extension, NOT priority.

## Reflection
- The pattern of *naming* the aimless state when advisor priorities diverge is healthy. The plan was already right; the fog was residue from arguing into it against pressure.
- The "subtraction over addition" discipline held all day. Several extension threads surfaced (cloud migration, sim env, Panda/DROID) — all properly parked or sequenced rather than crammed in.
- The own-robot REDO track (1hr/day Onshape → Jul 1 sprint) feels right because it addresses the *root cause* of why nice-to-haves keep being hacky (no stack control). Building own-robot in the back-half makes the parked nice-to-haves principled rather than hacky if they ever come back.
- The non-programmer-collector finding from the YAM meeting is the kind of operational detail that derails plans silently. Catching it pre-collection (not mid-batch) is exactly why "pipeline derisk before scaling" matters.

## Next steps
- Pre-vacation (tomorrow morning before flight): non-programmer instructions doc, space-mouse verification, pre-trip checklist (SSH chain from phone hotspot, push uncommitted, durable runs queued), Sergey reply
- Vacation Thu Jun 18 → Mon Jun 22: detailed method diagram + website V2 + Tier-1 visualizations + 1hr/day Onshape
- Tue Jun 23: in-person collector onboarding session + first collection run