Walk a discovery end-to-end¶

Diátaxis: tutorial. A single guided path you can follow start to finish. By the end you'll have run one full discovery — from a raw idea to a ratified decision brief handed to work-loop — and seen each gate, a divergence, a rejection/recovery, and the validation hooks. For the why, read the explanation The discovery loop afterward; for the slot shapes, the reference The discovery sidecar and roster. This walk uses a household-assistant example throughout; substitute your own idea and the steps are identical.

Before you start: install the product-engineering pack, and run in a harness that can pause for human input and write your verdict into a store the agent cannot edit (the discovery loop relies on that channel — see the explanation).

1. Start the loop¶

Give discovery-lead one prompt:

Use the discovery-loop to scaffold the product vision for a household executive-assistant AI — diverge on the product shape first, then converge to a decision brief, and flag what needs validation.

The loop first scans for existing discoveries (none yet), then scaffolds a new initiative: it copies the plan-tree template into docs/discovery/household-assistant/_state/ and opens at G0.

2. Ratify the value seed (G0)¶

frame-intent writes a product-vision intent slot — an assistant that helps a household run food, calendar, vendors, and budget by drafting and acting only on approval. The loop pauses with an option card and waits. You read it and reply approve. The verdict + your rationale land in the (append-only) decision log.

3. See the divergence (pre-G1.5)¶

This is the step that earns the loop its keep. explore-options generates candidate shapes across altitude × mechanic — for example:

The narrow kitchen slice is the myopic default; divergence forces the higher altitude (the whole household) and a deeper sub-domain (meal → recipe → ingredient → sourcing) onto the table. The not-chosen candidates are retained as parked/rejected with rationale — revivable later.

4. Make the altitude bet (G1.5)¶

The loop surfaces the altitude bet to you — it is a value/scope call, not something a referent decides. You pick whole-household coordinator. frame-domain then grounds how a household actually coordinates (wrapping research) and writes the scope boundary — the MVP out-of-scope register. You approve-with-constraint: "MVP excludes third-party fulfillment." The loop records the constraint and does not advance until the reduced surface re-converges.

5. Converge through the lenses¶

On the chosen spine, the lenses run as parallel writers onto the blackboard — product (decompose-intent), UX (map-customer-journey, map-screen-flow), tech (architecture, contracts) — bouncing off each other only through the open-questions queue. The security lens raises an open question (OQ): approved-learning needs an audit trail. The controller resolves it by adding an audit-view screen + an audit service — no agent-to-agent chat.

6. Watch a rejection cascade (recovery)¶

Suppose a fulfillment screen slipped in despite the G1.5 constraint. At reconcile, the controller (or your redirect) rejects cap.external-fulfillment. The loop shows you the blast radius first (screen:fulfillment + service:fulfillment will go stale), waits for your confirm, then walks the traceability out-edges, marks those slots stale, drops their edges, and re-runs only the UX lens on the reduced surface. The edge set scoped the blast radius — that is why the matrix is typed.

7. Self-coverage, then the reviewers (pre-G2)¶

The loop runs the full self-coverage gate (pre-mortem, the discovery-risk taxonomy, scenario-variation, fresh-context, domain-grounding, resolve-vs-surface) and writes a coverage record. Then the required discovery reviewers fire as forked-context lenses: discovery-threat-reviewer (threat model + compliance) and discovery-reliability-reviewer (failure modes + observability). The traceability lint reports no orphans — every node has a producer and a consumer.

8. Ratify the brief (G2)¶

discovery-lead renders the blackboard into a decision brief — emitted as a connected hypothesis: each load-bearing assumption carries a validation hook (kill condition + the real-world activity, scaffolded by plan-validation), and every node is labelled grounded, surfaced, or to-validate. The brief carries the required success-metrics / North-Star slot. You read it, adjudicate the one value tension the lenses surfaced, and approve.

9. Hand off to the build loop (G3)¶

The brief decomposes into an ordered, dependency-aware backlog; loop-cohort orders it; work-loop pulls the first item. You're done — you turned a raw idea into a build-ready brief, and the audit trail (the decision log + coverage record) records every gate.

What you have now¶

• A committed docs/discovery/household-assistant/ with the decision brief, the intent tree, the journey/blueprint/screens, and the backlog.
• A validation plan naming what still needs real users to confirm — because converged ≠ validated.
• Parked sub-ideas (e.g. recipe integration) you can resume any time with Resume the parked recipe-integration sub-idea.

To go deeper on any stage, re-run it with a targeted prompt (see the how-to Run a discovery).