Delivery Sequencing
Status: ✅ Decided — grounded in ADR-0014 and refined by ADR-0015
The execution plan assumed parallel team pods and a 90-day schedule. The actual team is 2–3 engineers. ADR-0014 makes this honest: read the 90-day plan as a forcing-function RFC, not a staffed commitment. Realistic horizon: ~6 months, serial.
The sequencing principles
Prove one vertical slice end-to-end before any breadth. The walking skeleton is a single Action (projects.CreateWorkPackage) → Event → synchronous projection → read-your-write → policy check → generated SDK call. This exercises the spine (see Consistency) on one thread. No breadth until the spine is proven.
Shape for the vision, size the runtime for the proof. This discipline produced every deferral: Scenario (ADR-0005), Value Type deferred phases (ADR-0007), Realm runtime governance (ADR-0008), writeback dispatch (ADR-0010), offline client stack (ADR-0013). The deferred pieces are not deleted — they are explicitly not-yet-built, with their design preserved.
Sequence strictly serially. The plan’s parallel pods collapse into one ordered thread.
Defer org machinery (Architecture Review Board, certification pipeline, parallel pods) until headcount justifies it.
The two freeze gates
The first milestone is the walking skeleton, plus discharging the two architecture freeze gates:
- ADR-0003 (truth model) — resolved by the slice-1 POC spike.
- ADR-0006 (kernel language) — resolved by the one-week TS-vs-Java build-off.
No architecture freeze while either is Proposed.
Slices
Slice 1 — prove the spine (ADR-0015): write→event→projection→read on the projects domain. Domain content hand-registered into kernel registries. Domain-agnostic guardrail in force (grep check). Discharges the freeze gates.
Slice 2 — prove the separation: introduce the v0 realm compiler and install-into-Universe path. Adding a second domain realm becomes a relocation of definitions, not a re-architecture of engines. This is the contribution boundary made concrete.
See also
- Reality Kernel — spine-first architecture
- Consistency — the truth-model spike (freeze gate)
- Kernel Language — the build-off (freeze gate)
- ADR-0014 — delivery scope and sequencing decision
- ADR-0015 — spine-first, domain-agnostic refinement
Open questions
- Detailed milestone timelines are not in ADR-0014 beyond the ~6-month frame for a 2–3 person team. They are not canon until a committed schedule is filed.
- Org/process scale-ups (ARB, certification) are explicitly out of scope until headcount grows — their design is not a current commitment.