jrklaus8 is building a Canadian Mike beside the original, not inside it

This is the opening move of jrklaus8's Canada-focused fork, and it sets the tone for everything that follows. Rather than reworking Mike's existing engine, the team dropped an entirely separate backend next to it - one built around Canadian needs: pulling from the country's public case-law databases, checking that legal citations actually hold up, and running law-society-style compliance audits with an eye on keeping data in-country.

The catch, and it's a real one: this new layer lives beside the original system, not within it. The two stacks duplicate the same plumbing - sign-in, search, prompting - and aren't wired together. So what exists today reads more as a parallel blueprint for a Canadian Mike than a working, integrated product. Promising direction, early days.