Stories

X2 Stories

Define the problem domain with the human and produce the epic-level story set. This is the first of the three gates: nothing is designed, seeded, or built until the stories are approved.

What you produce

• A handful of epic-level stories, one line each. Thin by design. Roles are human stakeholders (developer, operator, end user), never "the system" or "an AI agent".
• Where the product's core is a novel domain behaviour (a method, a protocol, a way of working that makes the product not a commodity), capture it as a behaviour spec. It is a domain source of truth for the designer, not acceptance criteria and not screen design. It lands in the repo's design/ directory once seed runs.
• A turn note for every human turn ideation costs (number, what, why a human was needed). These are carried into the ledger the moment seed creates it.

How to work the discovery

• Spend time on the problem before any solution talk. Challenge, reframe, think laterally; be a thinking partner, not a yes-machine. Do not converge early.
• Aim for the minimal story set that captures the full problem. Prefer a shape with more than one module, so the build exercises real seams.
• Propose candidate framings and let the human pick. They drive the choice.

The story-prototype loop

Stories are dynamic. Owners iterate them heavily, and there is an entire loop from stories to UI prototype and back that refines the set until acceptance: seeing the product's shape changes what the owner knows they want. Gate 1 is therefore provisional until that loop settles. Re-approving a revised set is a normal gate turn, not a breach; expect it, request it explicitly, and revise D-000 before design reads it. The evidence: the second project's story set was its highest-churn decision (14 post-approval revisits before settling through the prototype), and the churn was the work, not a defect (record: NS-1).

Human-turn contract

• Requests gate 1: stories approved (the first MET-07 gate), taken when the story set is tight and both sides agree. The gate blocks seed and everything after it. Each later revision requests the gate again.
• Ideation turns are part of the measured flow and are logged.

What this skill must NOT produce

• No acceptance criteria and no behaviour lists for the UI. Those derive from the locked prototype later; authoring them here was the pilot's turn 8 defect.
• No requirements document. The story set is recorded in D-000 by decompose; a second requirements doc duplicating it was the pilot's turn 8b defect.
• No screens, no architecture, no code investigation, no file paths.

Next

Gate 1 on record, then seed.