Design for tomorrow, written down so the work starts from a spec. Phase 0 is
already built; everything after it is plan.
The load-bearing decision is the smallest one. Ownership is answered today by
users.role === 'Super Admin', which was fine while roles were a hardcoded union
and nothing could write a new one — and becomes a privilege-escalation path the
moment roles are editable data, because then adding a role and becoming the owner
are the same feature. So phase 1 is just that: the owner is OWNER_USER_ID, every
existing call site keeps meaning owner, and nothing downstream starts until it
lands.
Teams union rather than restrict, which is the only coherent resolution and has a
consequence worth stating: a team can only ever grant. Deny rules are named under
what must not be built, along with a role that confers ownership and team-scoped
execution capabilities.
And the thing a reader would otherwise discover at the end of phase 4: there is
still no way to create a second account, so this is a permission model for
accounts that cannot yet exist. Sequenced last because it is orthogonal, flagged
because it may be worth doing first.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
