[ItsAlphaNeon]

What changed

The old README had grown to 500 lines and was out of date. It's now 227 lines, stays surface level, and sends readers to the website and wiki for detail.

Section	What's there
What is Lemon Studio?	A short description and the pre-alpha warning
Features	The main workspaces and tools, the 29 built-in plugins, and .lemon and .flp project files
Status	One row per area, with what's still missing
Get Lemon Studio	System requirements, the download page, and three commands to build from source
Plans	Steps to the first alpha, and what comes after it
Community, license, trademarks	Discord, bug reports, the clean-room rule, the ArtCraft request, and the notices

Other changes

• Names: the README now says arranger and instrument rack, as the app does. FL Studio appears only in the .flp section and the trademark notice.
• Screenshots: they're now the website's pictures of the demo song. The old ones were an empty project still labelled Playlist and Channel rack.
• docs/development.md (new): tests, crates, command-line tools, plugin folders, environment variables and the full third-party table moved here, so nothing is lost. A row for os-smf is new, and the per-plugin crate rows are now one paragraph.
• docs/status.md: its links to removed README sections now point to the Status section and the wiki's Troubleshooting page. Its body still uses the old names.

Worth checking

• Scripting and AI assistants: these now appear only in docs/development.md, in line with keeping them off the website. The old README listed them openly.
• Going stale: the "No builds have been released yet" line and the first-alpha table need updating when the first nightly ships.

Testing

• All relative links and files resolve, and every external link in the README answered 200.
• Emojis appear only in the status columns and their legends.
• Not yet looked at as rendered on GitHub, which this draft makes possible.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code