dropthejase publishes an honest scorecard for the AWS rebuild

Most forks quietly drift from upstream. This one writes down exactly where it has drifted, and where it falls short.

infrastructure

dropthejase is in the middle of rebuilding Louis on Amazon's cloud, and rather than burying the work in commit messages, the team has shipped a set of plain-English tracker documents alongside the code. One enumerates every feature in the original Mike and marks whether this fork preserved it, replaced it with an AWS-native equivalent, or deliberately skipped it. Another lays out the new system design end-to-end, with diagrams of how login, file upload, and chat now flow through Amazon's services.

Most striking is a "Known Gaps" section that openly lists what the fork does worse than upstream today - things like drag-and-drop attachments and certain sharing behaviours. There is also a short demo video linked from the README. For a fork in active migration, this level of self-auditing is unusual and unusually useful.

So what If you are evaluating Louis - or any Mike fork - for a pilot, this is the rare case where you can read the team's own honest list of trade-offs before you read a line of code.

View this fork on GitHub →

Spotted something wrong? Or know the PR text has fresher detail than the writeup above?

Commits in this thread

23 commits from dropthejase/louis, oldest first. Source extracted verbatim from the harvested git log.

SHA Subject Author Date
74bee403 docs: rewrite README for AWS migration architecture and setup Jason Lee 2026-05-06 ↗ GitHub
23f7b852 docs: add ARCHITECTURE.md covering full AWS system design and chat session flow Jason Lee 2026-05-07 ↗ GitHub
396019f8 docs: redraw architecture diagram to show Cognito User Pool, Pre-Token Gen Lambda, Identity Pool Jason Lee 2026-05-08 ↗ GitHub
ff1d1852 docs: add original functionality tracker with AWS migration status Jason Lee 2026-05-08 ↗ GitHub
23be0c2e docs: update migration notes with Aurora and credits tracking plans Jason Lee 2026-05-08 ↗ GitHub
58369083 Restructure docs: ARCHITECTURE.md to root, ignore docs/ Jason Lee 2026-05-09 ↗ GitHub
commit body
- Move ARCHITECTURE.md from docs/ to repo root (public-facing)
- Remove docs/ORIGINAL-FUNCTIONALITY.md (now gitignored with docs/)
- Remove aws-migration-notes.md from root (moved to docs/, now gitignored)
- .gitignore: ignore entire docs/ dir (plans, specs, migration notes are internal)
- README: clarify Finch vm init/start/stop lifecycle
9e7635ab docs: add FEATURE-PARITY.md mapping original routes to AWS migration Jason Lee 2026-05-11 ↗ GitHub
4e062e54 docs: add To Test section and Intentionally Skipped to FEATURE-PARITY.md Jason Lee 2026-05-12 ↗ GitHub
cf222093 chore: added architecture Jason Lee 2026-05-14 ↗ GitHub
2914f9d2 chore: readme and architecture Jason Lee 2026-05-14 ↗ GitHub
6edd164d chore: README udpates Jason Lee 2026-05-14 ↗ GitHub
12cafc1b docs(architecture): update for MCP, Skills, AgentStack, S3 buckets, dead table removal Jason Lee 2026-05-15 ↗ GitHub
8161f5c0 feat: AWS migration - Louis on AWS (Bedrock AgentCore, Aurora, S3, CDK) Jason Lee 2026-05-15 ↗ GitHub
138e1ed5 docs: update README/ARCHITECTURE, rename .env.local to .env Jason Lee 2026-05-15 ↗ GitHub
commit body
- Rename frontend/.env.local.example → .env.example; add .env to .gitignore
- README: fix env setup instructions, expand Cleanup section (Skills/Admin
  buckets, Secrets Manager MCP secrets, AgentStack in destroy command)
- README: expand Disclaimer (personal capacity, legal advice, production readiness)
- ARCHITECTURE.md: fix Bedrock model IDs for Opus 4.7 and Sonnet 4.6;
  add model cards link
599dc711 docs: update Known Gaps - add drag-and-drop attachment rendering limitation, clarify sharing gap Jason Lee 2026-05-15 ↗ GitHub
21c58f55 docs: add Python Strands agents migration note to Ideas for Extension Jason Lee 2026-05-15 ↗ GitHub
8fa196ae chore: architecture diagram updates Jason Lee 2026-05-16 ↗ GitHub
ec4621ff docs: fix shared_with schema description in ARCHITECTURE.md Jason Lee 2026-05-16 ↗ GitHub
6b570315 chore: README updates + demo video Jason Lee 2026-05-16 ↗ GitHub
8c73bf47 docs: add demo video and timestamps to README Jason Lee 2026-05-16 ↗ GitHub
41780a2e chore: Add video to README Jason 2026-05-16 ↗ GitHub
b0e404ae chore: remove demo.mp4 from repo (hosted on GitHub CDN) Jason Lee 2026-05-16 ↗ GitHub
205f4e0c docs(readme): add AWS region to configuration notes Jason Lee 2026-05-16 ↗ GitHub

Capture this thread into my fork

Download a single Markdown prompt that tells Claude how to port every commit above into your working tree — adapting paths and structure to match your repo. Run it via claude -p < capture-thread-355.md from inside the repo you want the changes in.

⬇ Download capture-thread-355.md