Gates and charters
Each level does the work of the one below it, and you design one step higher. The work moves up and each flaw should get harder to repeat. Blue marks design, by you or by an agent. Red marks error correction.
You make the thing
Every piece passes through your hands once. Nothing carries over to the next piece.
You design how the thing is made
One source of truth, coupled cleanly to everything that uses it. Change it once and every artefact follows. This is good engineering, and every level above repeats it one step higher.
Agents design how the thing is made
Agents do the L0 work for you, and agents can run other agents. You design what they are given: the brief, the skills, the assets. Flaws come out too, and you fix each one with another prompt. The same flaw comes back because nothing upstream changed.
You design the gates
Stages have gates. Each gate checks for one class of flaw and sends caught work back. You still catch what gets through by hand, and you write each new gate after you notice a flaw.
What a gate is made of
A gate has two halves. Guidance the agent reads before it works, and a sensor that checks afterwards. The sensor can be a test, a lint or an agent review. Gates are allowed to be fuzzy. Trying is the point, and silence is the only failure.
How strong is a fix
When a flaw reaches you, pick the strongest fix that is cheap enough. A prompt fixes one output. A gate fixes a class of flaw.
You design the charter
A charter holds a set of gates, the scope they apply to and the exceptions. When a flaw leaks, an incident goes into the charter and a gate for that class appears. Leaks fall away. This is the ratchet.
Two charters, shared gates
The charter decides where a gate fires. The sim core is the physics of the engine and runs the SI units gate. LOD is how distant things are drawn cheaply and doesn't need SI precision, so that gate never fires there. One gate definition, like the memory ladder, can serve both charters. Results go up as counts. The small dots under a gate are its notes, and they stay there. The counts in the table are simulated.
| Charter | Gate | Met | Attempted | Waived | Impossible |
|---|
Charters design charters
Incidents from every project pool together. Patterns that show up in several charters become the starting point for new ones. This level isn't built yet.
Why L2 is where you get stuck
At L2 you write gates from flaws you happen to notice, one at a time. Moving to L3 needs counts coming up from the gates, so the charter can see where they pass, strain or fail. Wire the counts first and L3 has something to steer by.
Which level you work at
Client work is mostly L1 and L2, because the factory belongs to someone else. Personal projects are your own factory, so L3 is open there. Say the level at the start of a session and the agent works at it.