Findings at intake
The repository shows one commit this year. It is dated January 6 and the message is "wip." The Department has examined the file and moves to the second exhibit without comment: a domain — something with "stack" or "kit" in it — renewing at $12 a year for a launch scheduled in a year that has since concluded. The records suggest there are several of these. Domains are how developers light candles for projects that have already passed.
If you arrived by typing "abandoned side project" or "too many unfinished projects" into a search bar at an hour your commit history would recognize, be advised the clerk has pulled the form already. Not your file — the form. The file requires your participation, briefly, and then never again.
The valley appears on our maps
The Department maintains survey records of the terrain between a tutorial's final exercise and the first commit of one's own project. It is a valley. The syllabus does not mention it, no guardrail was ever installed, and the floor is littered with scaffolded starter repos — each with a README that says TODO, an auth flow that nearly worked, and a .env.example of real ambition.
For the record: the tutorial did its job. You learned the thing. The project was only the crate the learning was meant to ship in, and the learning — intake has checked — left the crate with you. Crates may be abandoned with honor.
On the question "should I finish my app"
The Department does not answer should-questions; Form UB-1 has no field for them. It can release procedural data: petitioners asking this one at the window generally hold an app that is 80 percent finished and has been 80 percent finished for eleven months, the remaining fifth consisting of login, billing, and the App Store screenshot sizes. The percentage is not the problem. The open tab in your head is the problem, and it has been costing more than the domain does.
Both available dispositions are honorable. One is to finish, in which case godspeed, and kindly close this circular. The other is to discharge the matter for $4 and let it stop billing you. Should you finish it afterward anyway, the certificate is restamped COMPLETED — CLASSIFICATION: MIRACLE for a $3 amendment; the stamp is kept in its own drawer, which has never needed to be large.
Disposition of the repository
Form UB-1 enters the undertaking in the permanent Public Registry of Unfinished Business: registry number, official Cause of Abandonment, side project guilt computed to the day and printed as a single total — a figure petitioners describe as somehow both worse and better. Standard Discharge is $4. Discharge with Full Honors, gold seal included, is $7; the seal is digital, which you of all people understood immediately. The privacy-minded may file WITHHELD — a number and nothing else, which frankly reads as more mysterious than most launches.
Certificate holders receive a badge for the README. It reads HONORABLY ABANDONED, links to the public record, and is the only badge in the ecosystem that cannot break. Paste it above the install instructions. Archive the repo. Nothing about it will ever go red.
The certificate is a satirical novelty document with no legal effect — it will not hold up in court, with your CTO, or in the comments, and the Department's disclaimer is thorough on the point. Refunds within 7 days by reply to your Stripe receipt. The registry entry is as permanent as the guilt it replaces, with the advantage of fitting on one page.