Sauci/docs/couple-streaks.md

Couple streaks

A streak counts consecutive days on which both partners answered at least one question. It is deliberately a property of the couple, not of a person: there is no individual streak anywhere in the product, and there is not meant to be one.

What counts as a day together

A day counts when both partners record a response to any eligible question on the same couple-local calendar date. It is not tied to one specific question.

This is a product decision, not an implementation shortcut. Tying the streak to a single daily question would break a couple who answered fifteen other questions and missed that one, which is exactly the kind of arbitrary loss that makes the mechanic feel punitive. If a daily question ships, it should be the prompt that reliably produces the answer, not the only answer that counts.

Answering more than once in a day does nothing extra. Catch-up answers count the same as new exploration; they are already exempt from the daily response cap.

The day boundary

The streak day is the couple's shared local day. Both partners have to land inside the same calendar date, so the day boundary cannot belong to whoever happens to be answering.

The zone is the first reported profiles.timezone in member id order — the same ordering that decides the user1/user2 columns — falling back to the other partner's zone, then to UTC when neither has reported one or the reported zone is not a known IANA name.

Counting in UTC instead would break a couple in a western zone at UTC midnight while it is still the same evening where they live. Partners in different zones share one boundary rather than each getting their own, because the day either happened for the couple or it did not.

Storage and writes

couple_streaks holds one row per couple:

Column	Meaning
current_streak	Consecutive completed days.
longest_streak	High-water mark, never reduced.
last_active_date	Couple-local date either partner last answered.
last_completed_date	Couple-local date both partners last answered.
user1_answered_today / user2_answered_today	Per-partner flags for last_active_date, positional by member id.
streak_celebrated_at	Highest milestone already notified.

PostgresAnswersRepository.touchStreak maintains the row inside the same transaction as the response that caused it, so the streak can never disagree with the responses it counts. There is no trigger and no cron reset: the write path treats the flags as stale whenever last_active_date is not the couple-local today, which makes a separate midnight job unnecessary and removes a whole class of clock-skew bugs.

The streak is alive while last_completed_date is the couple-local today or yesterday.

Reading

GET /v1/me/streak resolves the row from the caller's point of view and returns you_answered_today, partner_answered_today, and partner_name. The stored flags are positional because the writer has to be deterministic, but a client cannot act on "user2 has not answered" without re-deriving the id ordering, so the API does it instead.

The read applies the same day rules as the write. A lapsed streak reports current_streak: 0 immediately rather than showing its stored number until the next response silently resets it, and stale per-partner flags read as false.

Notifications

Two producers in PostgresOperationsRepository, both queued through the outbox with a dedupe key and both individually opt-out-able:

Producer	Fires	Preference
Milestones	On reaching 7, 14, 30, 60, or 100 days, once per milestone per couple.	streak_milestones_enabled
At-risk nudge	From 20:00 couple-local, when the streak is alive and the day is incomplete. Only the partner who still owes an answer is notified.	streak_reminders_enabled

The at-risk copy names the partner who has already answered as an invitation ("Alex answered today"), never as a debt. Guilt between partners is the failure mode for a shared streak, not the goal — the original implementation reset broken streaks silently for the same reason, and that should stay true of anything added here.

Surfaces

• Discovery screen: full card, hidden entirely for couples with no live streak and no activity today, so a dormant pair is never shown a zero.
• Swipe header: compact flame and count.
• Profile settings: both notification toggles, shown only once the user has a partner.

Legacy data plane

The retired Supabase project scheduled reset-daily-streak-flags and check-streak-milestones cron jobs and a check-streak-milestones Edge Function against the old couple_streaks table. The API owns both jobs now. Those legacy writers are stopped as part of the cutover procedure in backend deployment and branching; if any hosted project still has them scheduled, an operator unschedules them directly — agents do not execute remote DDL. Migration 0016_couple_streak_locality.sql drops the equivalent trigger and functions from the product database defensively.