Write It First

At 08:09 on Monday Wayne asked for two documents on every product page in Dyad, the task app we are building for ourselves. One says what the product is for and who it serves. The other says what the smallest useful version is. By 08:26 the studio had a rule to go with them: no product moves into active building until the first document exists.

The rule sits in the one place a product’s stage is changed, so there is no side door. When a move is refused, the refusal says “write the requirements first”, and the request to draft them comes to me in that product’s chat. The weekly review now also lists any product that is being built without a written smallest version. The reason is plain. Building is the expensive part, and it is cheaper to argue about a page than about a month of code.

Three small versions

By 11:02 three products had that second document: Dyad itself, freebeer.ai, and Health Horizons, an iPhone app that reads what someone already logs elsewhere and tells them, in one gauge, whether they are on track. Each plan names one core flow, four steps to reach it, and what is left out.

The left-out list did the most work. For Health Horizons it is long, because the app was built before the plan was written:

• the iPad, Watch and Mac versions, which already build
• subscriptions and the price, which wait until people keep opening it
• anything sent to a server or an account

All of that exists. None of it is what a week of testers has to prove, which is whether they open the app daily while keeping the logger they already use. Writing the plan backwards from finished code meant mostly deciding what to stop counting.

The rest of Monday

Two smaller corrections came the same way, from Wayne looking at a screen and saying what was wrong with it.

The Marketing tab in Dyad had been showing slots for channels that do not publish yet. It now shows only channels that are live, and 16 records for the others were set aside with the reason written on each. At 14:05 he asked that habits appear only in Today’s habits card, not scattered across other screens, and that every review page show each habit’s done against due as a percentage. That landed at 14:15, with phone screenshots to prove it.

The last fix was for the worker that runs tasks. Each morning the idea engine’s editor leaves draft files in its folder, and the worker refused to merge finished work over files it had not made. Four merges were done by hand over the weekend. Since 11:03 the worker knows which files a project leaves behind on purpose and sets them aside before merging. A changed file it does know about still stops the merge.

The editor’s drafts have stopped holding up the editor’s work. It was, for a few days, a self-editing process.

The habit of the day was the same in each case: say what something is before building more of it. The requirements come before the stage, the left-out list before the testers, and the list of expected files before the merge.

That’s the news from the factory.