The failure this is aimed at
Everything started, nothing shipped. It rarely comes from forgetting the work — the work is remembered perfectly well, across nine repositories, several notes apps and a couple of half-finished branches. It comes from having more active commitments than attention to spend on them, and from no mechanism that ever says so out loud.
A todo list makes this worse. It is happy to hold all nine, it never objects, and it presents the tenth idea with exactly the same weight as the project that is two days from shipping.
What the cap does
DevDeck limits how many projects can be active at the same time. Passing the cap is not a warning you can dismiss — something has to be parked before something else becomes active. The decision is forced at the moment you have the context to make it, rather than avoided indefinitely.
The number is small on purpose. A cap you never reach is not a cap.
Parking is not archiving
A parked project keeps everything: tasks, subtasks, time blocks, connected repository, versions, notes. Nothing is deleted, nothing is collapsed into a summary, and unparking restores exactly the state you left.
The difference is attention. A parked project does not appear in your active list, does not count toward this week's plan and does not sit in the corner of the dashboard implying guilt. It is a statement about what you are working on now, not a judgement about whether the project was any good.
What this changes day to day
Opening the app stops being a survey of everything you have ever begun. The active set is small enough to hold in your head, which is the condition under which people actually finish things. When a new idea arrives it is still welcome — it just has to win its place against something already active, which most new ideas quietly decline to do.
Where it stops
The cap governs what is active in DevDeck. It cannot stop you working on something you never entered, and it makes no claim about whether a parked project should have been parked. It removes the ambiguity, not the judgement.