what we build · part seven · closing
Resolution, not maximum
The discipline of this volume is not "do every artifact carefully." It is "produce only the resolution the next phase needs." Backbones are enough to map. Wireframes are enough to amigos. Scenarios are enough to pull. Each phase deliberately stops short of the next.
Over-shaping is as expensive as under-shaping — wireframes for stories that won't be pulled for two months are wireframes that will be redone after the team learns from release 1.
What is built is downstream of which artifacts caught the meaning. The artifacts cannot grade themselves. The brief grades them. The gate is when the team checks.
The brief's prediction is also still alive. Forty-seven minutes, recorded on a Wednesday afternoon before any design or code began. That number is not a target the team is chasing — it is the test the team is building toward. When release 1 ships, the prediction will be checked. If grading time drops below ten minutes, the model the team had of Gal's situation was correct enough. If it doesn't, the model was wrong somewhere, and the next cycle has to ask where. Volume V will be about that check.
What Volume IV is for
Volume IV — How We Build — begins at the moment a developer pulls the ready story into In progress. Every artifact this volume produced now becomes a constraint the code must honour. The wireframe states become the screens. The API contract becomes the endpoint. The schema becomes the migration. The ADRs become the lines of code that cannot be written in a different way. The scenarios become the tests. The story name becomes the PR title. The scenario names travel into commit messages, into CI failures, into bug reports, into incident postmortems — and eventually back to the brief, when the prediction is checked. The work of Volume IV is to ensure all of that survives implementation.
The story is ready to pull. Gal still grades exams the way she always has. The 47 minutes have not changed yet. The understanding has crossed six gates and is still intact.
The next thing that happens is a developer pulls the story into In progress.