Write the ORE Studio development methodology manual

Table of Contents

This page is a capture in the inbox bucket of the product backlog — a pre-sprint idea, not yet pulled into a sprint as a story.

What

Create a user manual chapter (or standalone manual) that documents the five-pillar methodology ORE Studio uses to develop itself. The five pillars are: (1) the Karpathy vibe-coding approach — human sets direction and judges outcomes, LLM handles execution, with rapid iterative cycles and trust in the model's judgment on implementation details; (2) Cybernetics — feedback loops, requisite variety, the Viable System Model as an organising principle for the information architecture; (3) MASD — Model Assisted Software Development: logical/physical space, facets, archetypes, the backout strategy, and LLM-adapted codegen; (4) Agile — sprint-based delivery, story/task decomposition, capture triage, and the compass toolchain that keeps the process frictionless; (5) LLMs — the dual human/LLM audience, skill authoring, memory management, and session continuity practices. The manual must explain not just each pillar in isolation but how they compose: cybernetics provides the control theory; MASD provides the modelling discipline; agile provides the delivery cadence; LLMs provide the execution layer; the Karpathy approach provides the human-machine collaboration model. Concrete examples should include: compass commands for common workflows, skill authoring and deployment, session orientation with bearings, PR lifecycle, capture-to-story promotion, and codegen via literate templates.

Why

ORE Studio has a distinctive and non-obvious methodology that is not documented as a coherent whole. New contributors (human or LLM) must piece it together from scattered references — cybernetics in doc/meta/, MASD in doc/knowledge/masd/, agile in doc/agile/, LLMs in doc/llm/. A unified methodology manual would (a) onboard contributors faster, (b) make the design decisions legible to external readers, and (c) serve as the canonical reference when the methodology itself evolves.

References

  • Karpathy on vibe-coding (X post) — the primary reference for the human-direction / LLM-execution collaboration model.
  • Cybernetics — existing knowledge doc: feedback, variety, regulation, Beer's VSM.
  • MASD — existing knowledge doc: full methodology overview with Dogen references.
  • Agile — existing knowledge doc: agile information architecture index.
  • ORE Studio as an LLM-first system — existing knowledge doc: philosophy, dual audience, contribution model.

See also

Emacs 29.1 (Org mode 9.6.6)