PRODUCT_MANUAL.md - your app's source of truth

PRODUCT_MANUAL.md lives in the ZIP root. It's the single, plain-English description of your product: what it does, who it's for, features, pricing, legal, launch status, and out-of-scope items.

MANIFEST.json sits next to it with the same info in structured form. Lovable reads both when building.

Every Workshop download tells Lovable to update PRODUCT_MANUAL.md after any meaningful change - features, pricing, audience, branding, launch status - and add a dated note at the bottom.

The "Intentionally NOT in this product" section captures things you explicitly said no to. Lovable is told to respect it so your app never regresses toward rejected features.

You can hand-edit it anytime. It's plain Markdown - open it in any text editor. Lovable will merge your edits into future changelog entries.

Paste it into /vip and get upsell ideas, sales page copy, email sequences, a support bot, and a roadmap coach - all grounded ONLY in what your app actually does.

Anyone joining the project reads one file and knows the whole product.

Six months in, when you ask Lovable to add a feature, the manual is still the ground truth. No hallucinated history.