The Guide to developer mode (v0, proposals)

Written: 2026-11-11, at the kick-off of c3. For: the engineer who will point these pages at a live sensor, and anyone reviewing what we are about to build. Standing: proposals. Nothing here is built unless a line says "today". Where a page states a fact about qcontrol, it was read from main as of 2026-11-10 and names the file.

Read in this order:

1. What developer mode is: the pages, the gate, what it costs, and what is open to an expert's review.
2. Run it on your machine: what works today, how the app finds a sensor, and what each failure means.
3. Live Activity: how the app reaches a sensor, the data (read from code, or guessed), the pipeline, the states, and the asks of the sensor. Phase 1 is built.
4. Monitor: the contract: the shapes the Monitor page needs that no other process can read yet.
5. Config: three modes: Manual, Qplane, Endpoint.
6. Synthetic scenarios: the fake data, and how a real session becomes a scenario.
7. Footprint: the readings, the recipe, and the sensor's side of the bill.

The plan and Mark's rulings behind these pages are in design: ../design/cycles/c138.developer-mode/plan.md.

When developer mode is built, these pages are made final from what was built, move to docs/dev/, and the app shows them at Dev › Guide.