About those emoji labels that suddenly appeared...

[electrohyun]

If you opened the issue tracker today, you may have noticed five colorful labels that were not there before:

• 🎯 Fidelity (provisional)
• 🧩 Extensibility (provisional)
• ⚡ Productivity (provisional)
• 🛡️ Reliability (provisional)
• 🌱 Sustainability (provisional)

They appeared because the project is moving into the closing work toward v1.0.0, and I needed a clearer way to identify and organize what remains.

Smocket has already been using these five development lenses when thinking about design and project direction. They answer different questions: whether behavior matches Socket.IO, whether the design can grow cleanly, whether Smocket makes tests easier to write, whether its claims remain trustworthy, and whether the project can continue to evolve.

Originally, I intended them to remain a design and review framework only. They lived in the documentation and were deliberately kept out of the issue-level vocabulary that contributors and people browsing the tracker would need to understand.

As the remaining v1 work accumulated, however, the issue list became increasingly difficult to read at a glance. Existing labels are good at explaining the type or readiness of work—bug, enhancement, needs decision, and so on—but they do not always show why a task matters to the v1 finish. I temporarily surfaced the five lenses as emoji labels to make that relationship visible while the remaining work is being organized.

These labels are provisional in the literal sense:

• they are not new priorities or milestones;
• contributors are not expected to classify new issues with them;
• they do not replace the existing work-type and readiness labels;
• 🎯 Fidelity (provisional) intentionally overlaps with the existing lowercase fidelity label during this experiment rather than replacing it.

If the labels prove useful, I may refine their names, descriptions, and boundaries, document the convention, and keep some or all of them. If they add more vocabulary than clarity, they may simply be removed. At the moment I am leaning toward removal after they have served this short-term organizing purpose, but I wanted the reason for their sudden appearance to be visible rather than leaving everyone to infer it from the issue list.

Feedback is welcome, especially from anyone using the tracker: do these labels make the remaining work easier to understand, or do they mostly add visual and conceptual noise?