TIPs — Tally Improvement Proposals

A TIP is a design document for a non-trivial change to Tally: it captures the motivation, the design, the trade-offs considered, and the implementation plan for a feature before (and while) it is built. TIPs are the project's durable design record — the place to understand why something works the way it does, not just how.

Each TIP has a header table with a Status (Draft, Implemented, …), a number, and an author. A TIP number can span more than one document when a feature ships in phases (see the implemented/unimplemented split below).

Implemented vs. unimplemented

Documents are organized by what has actually shipped:

• TIPs/ (this folder) holds TIPs — or the parts of a TIP — that are not yet implemented: drafts, and the still-pending phases of a feature whose earlier phases have already landed.
• TIPs/implemented/ holds the design records for work that is implemented and verified. Moving a doc here marks the design as done and preserves it as the canonical record of what was built.

Splitting a phased TIP

When a TIP ships in layers, we split it rather than move the whole thing:

1. The implemented design moves to implemented/ (Status → Implemented), with a short context banner noting which layers are done and pointing to the continuation.
2. A continuation doc stays in TIPs/ covering only the unimplemented phases, with its own context banner pointing back to the implemented base.

This keeps implemented/ an accurate record of shipped work while the root folder always reflects what is still outstanding.