An agent does the work,a person holds every gate.
An AI agent holds the seats that specify, plan, implement, review and answer. Every gate is approved by a seat a person holds.
Generated from the model, so the words below are its own — and in the one language it is written in. The rest of this site is bilingual; a translated copy would be a second thing to keep true, which is what this page argues against.
Deciding
How the Owner decides what comes next, from an overview of all open work checked at the moment of asking, because building fast is solved and deciding well is not.
Owner
Surveyor
- 01Survey
- Find out where the open work stands now, not where it stood when it was last looked at.
- 02Propose
- Put one decision to the Owner with a recommendation, and take the Owner's word on it.
- 03Carry
- Do what the Owner's word covers, tell whoever it touches, and report what happened.
Delivery
How anything we publish is shaped, specified, planned, made and merged, in code and in prose.
Owner
Specifier
Planner
Controller
Implementer
Reviewer
Writer
Translator
- 01Shape
- Decide what kind of change this is, how far it reaches, and how much of it gets written down.
- 02Spec
- Write what the change must do, completely enough that nobody downstream has to guess.
- 03Plan
- Cut the approved specification into pieces that can be worked one at a time.
- 04Implement
- Make the thing, and let nothing go forward unread.
- 05Integrate
- Put the change where it binds, release what other repositories take from it, and move everything that names it.
Contribution
How a change offered from outside as a pull request to one of our repositories is reviewed and taken, under the same rules a change from inside is held to.
Owner
Contributor
Reviewer
Surveyor
- 01Propose
- Offer the change, under the address the Contributor means to be known by.
- 02Consider
- Establish what the change is for, before anyone spends time on how it is written.
- 03Review
- Find what is wrong with the change, and hand it to whoever merges as findings rather than as a verdict.
- 04Integrate
- Take the change into the default branch, and carry it to whoever vendors or pins what it touched.
Feature request
How somebody outside asks for something GuestGraph does not do, a capability of the engine or a system it cannot yet reach, as a GitHub issue, and gets an answer they can act on.
Owner
Requestor
- 01Raise
- Say where it can be answered that GuestGraph would not do something the asker needed.
- 02Understand
- Turn what somebody asked for into the thing they could not do.
- 03Triage
- Decide what kind of thing the gap is, and whether it is ours to fill.
- 04Answer
- Give the asker something they can act on, whether or not anything will be built.
Answering
How a visitor's question about GuestGraph is answered from this model, by an agent, with nothing added and nobody reading the answer before it goes out.
Owner
Visitor
Answerer
- 01Answer
- Give the visitor what the model says, in their words, and not a claim more.
Narrating
How a talk's reviewed speaker notes become the clips a visitor hears, in English and in German, with every clip heard by the Owner before it ships.
Owner
Narrator
- 01Narrate
- Turn each changed note into a clip in its language, and let none of them out unheard.
Each process draws its own board: delivery, slice by slice; contributions, proposed as pull requests; feature requests, raised as GitHub issues; and answering, where the chat replies to a visitor. Read a row for what a seat does across the work, and a column for who touches a phase. The gate marks are the argument: every gate is approved by a seat a person holds, and no agent row carries one. A name beside a seat is the profile that holds it; a seat with no name is held by a person the model does not name. A seat opens onto its card on the model page.
How to read it
A seat is not a person. A profile holds some seats, and its name stands beside them. A seat with no name is held by a person; the model says that much and not who.
A gate is what a phase cannot be left without. The Owner approves most of them. The Requestor approves the first phase of a feature request, and the Contributor the first phase of a contribution.
No mark is typed. Every cell is read off the phase's own file, so the board cannot disagree with the process it draws.
Generated from guestgraph/mental-model@HEAD