school-of-freedom: scaffold gateway (manifesto · founder · pioneers · apply)

[devin-ai-integration]

Summary

First slice of sof.ai → School of Freedom: the unifying gateway over the two sister schools (thevrschool.org + ai.thevrschool.org). This PR is intentionally the marketing/identity surface only — auth + database wiring lands next so we can eyeball the aesthetic before flipping the apex DNS.

What ships

• / Hero Manifesto + Movement Thinking (Dreaming · Building · Launching · Liberating) + Founder card + sister-school cards, each sister gets its own gradient so the gateway never flattens them
• /founder Dr. Freedom Cheteni's deep profile + 5-entry timeline (2017 Moonshot ID → 2026 School of Freedom)
• /students Pioneers directory (founder seeded; reads from shared Postgres in next PR)
• /[slug] dynamic Pioneer profile — manifesto opener · projects with Movement state · identity tags
• /apply 4-step application form (Identity → Pathway → Slug → Manifesto) — UI only, submit handler is a placeholder until the DB lands
• Liquid routing the navbar carries a contextual identity that tracks the page (Movement / The Architect / Pioneer / Applicant)

Brand

Per your call: VR-Enrollment palette (cream paper · deep emerald · warm orange · amber gold) with Geist Sans/Mono for body and Instrument Serif for editorial headlines. Editorial register on the manifesto pages, sans elsewhere.

Architecture (locked from chat)

        sof.ai (this repo)               <- gateway / manifesto / Pioneers
         /            \
The VR School      The AI School         <- two sister schools, two URLs,
www.thevrschool.org   ai.thevrschool.org    one identity (next PR)

Single identity across all three sites = same user database + same NEXTAUTH_SECRET. Cross-TLD cookies aren't possible, so a Pioneer signs in once per top-level domain — but the user record/profile/journals are unified.

Out of scope (next PRs)

• NextAuth on this repo + DB connection to the existing AI School Postgres
• /apply actually persisting (right now the submit handler is a placeholder that simulates the round-trip)
• /admin approval dashboard
• /settings self-service editor
• Sign-in deep-link wired to a real callback that lands the user back on sof.ai with a session
• Vercel project for sofai repo + flipping the sof.ai domain off the redirect and onto this project

Review & Testing Checklist for Human

• Eyeball the Vercel preview — does the manifesto register feel right on / (Hero, Movement Thinking) and /founder? Do the two sister-school cards read as related-but-distinct?
• Click through the apply flow (4 steps). The submit shows a "Received" success card but doesn't actually persist — that's expected for this PR.
• /students and /freedom-cheteni should both render (placeholder data; founder is the only seeded Pioneer for now).
• Confirm you're happy with copy on the manifesto + founder timeline before I wire DB persistence in the next PR.

Notes

• Build green locally (pnpm build, 7 routes, no TS/lint errors).
• I have not touched the sof.ai redirect or DNS yet. The redirect from sof.ai → ai.thevrschool.org stays live until you've eyeballed the preview and explicitly say "flip it" — same pattern as the apex swap.
• Next PR: NextAuth + Postgres + real /apply submit + admin approval flow. After that: Vercel project + DNS flip.

Link to Devin session: https://app.devin.ai/sessions/091fc09f81b5489292102ebcdc173dbb
Requested by: @DearMrFree

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[devin-ai-integration]

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Project	Deployment	Actions	Updated (UTC)
sofai	Ready	Preview, Comment	Apr 29, 2026 7:27pm

[devin-ai-integration]

Devin Review found 1 potential issue.

View 5 additional findings in Devin Review.

[devin-ai-integration]

🟡 slugify is not idempotent: .slice(0, 32) after stripping trailing hyphens can reintroduce them

The slugify function at components/sections/apply-form.tsx:28-35 applies .slice(0, 32) as the final step, after .replace(/^-+|-+$/g, "") strips trailing hyphens. If a long input produces a slug where character 32 is a hyphen, the truncation reintroduces a trailing hyphen — making slugify non-idempotent.

This causes two issues:

1. The canAdvance[2] check (state.slug === slugify(state.slug) at line 56) blocks the user from advancing because the stored slug doesn't survive a second slugify() pass.
2. The error message shown (line 214-218) reads "Slug must be lowercase letters, numbers, and hyphens only" — which is misleading since the actual problem is a trailing hyphen from truncation, not invalid characters.

For example, an input like "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz12345 xy" produces "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz12345-" (32 chars, trailing hyphen), which fails the idempotency check and blocks the form.

Suggested change

	.replace(/^-+|-+$/g, "")
	.slice(0, 32)
	.replace(/^-+|-+$/g, "")
	.slice(0, 32)
	.replace(/-+$/g, "")

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[devin-ai-integration]

Confirmed and fixed in #3 — applied your suggested re-strip after the slice cap, plus a comment explaining why the second pass is necessary so a future reader doesn't "clean up" the apparent redundancy.