vision

vision: the bar everything else measures against

The gauntlet attacks plans with it, review scores weeks against it, plan refuses to scope without it. One short file, interrogated into existence once, revised deliberately, never re-litigated by accident.

  the fuzzy picture
        |
  [ interrogate ]   diagnosis -> direction -> what gets sacrificed
        |
  [ checkpoint ]    one screen, founder says yes
        |
  wiki/business/vision.md   read by every skill, scored every week

Step 0: Preflight

Read references/CONVENTIONS-core.md and run its Universal preflight. A Fresh, Partial, or Wrong-folder result stops and runs the co-founder-setup skill before anything else (re-sync for Partial), without writing. On Ready, read the charter and its path map before the vault.

Done when: the founder system is Ready and every path below comes from its charter.

Step 1: Stub intake

A stub may exist at wiki/business/vision-stub.md (setup writes it). Treat it as INPUT only, never as the canonical vision. Its recognized fields are business, audience, quarter goal, and founder laws: map business + audience into a candidate Direction, the laws into candidate sacrifices, the goal into This quarter. Diagnosis and sacrifice are NOT in any stub; the interview below elicits them explicitly. The canonical output is always wiki/business/vision.md, and once it exists the stub gets deleted.

Step 2: The interview

One question per turn, a Working hypothesis: attached. It helps the founder react and does not become consequential strategy advice unless it clears the shared receipts contract in references/CONVENTIONS-receipts-contract.md. The vault first: past learnings, the decision log, and the current numbers inform every working hypothesis you offer. Day zero with an empty vault works too; the interview IS the input.

Walk three layers in order, and push back where the answers go soft:

1. Diagnosis. What is actually going on: the real constraint holding the business back, in one honest sentence. Push past symptoms ("not enough sales") to the constraint that causes them ("nobody knows the offer exists" is a different business than "people look and don't buy"). A diagnosis the founder has evidence for beats an aspiration every time; probe for the receipt behind it.
2. Direction. The guiding policy: the KIND of moves this business makes, and for whom. Fuzzy answers get the gap probes: who has actually paid, what is the smallest true version of this ambition, what would the founder bet a month on?
3. Sacrifice. What this direction deliberately gives up. A vision with no sacrifice is a wish. Get at least one real thing on the record the business will NOT chase this year, in the founder's words.

Then the quarter: ONE goal, measurable, theirs.

The quarter's target is founder-owned. Apply the shared parameter gate: when evidence invalidates the old number and no replacement is supplied, ask for the replacement in one question or leave a Working hypothesis: unverified under Needs your call. Never silently choose the new target or overwrite the current one with a suggested number.

Ask before you assert: never present a quantity, duration, sample size, date, or causal motive in prose before asking the founder for it or citing a receipt for it.

Done when: diagnosis, direction, sacrifice, and quarter goal each exist in the founder's words with pushback survived.

Before the checkpoint, run the shared durable claim admission gate on every diagnosis, target, and causal statement. Reopen each cited file and quote the supporting line. A founder's chosen target is labeled Founder-stated: unverified until evidence verifies it; a working hypothesis never becomes a silent target or a factual diagnosis.

Step 3: The checkpoint

One screen: the diagnosis (2 lines), the direction (2-3 lines), the sacrifices (the not-list), the quarter goal (1 line), and anything that Needs their call. Every line judgeable without homework. Corrections integrate and the WHOLE screen re-presents; a revision is never a confirmation.

Done when: the founder says yes to the exact text about to be written.

Step 4: Write it

wiki/business/vision.md, base-five frontmatter (type: business) plus strategy_state (parked or cleared), internal_receipt, and external_receipt, under 40 lines. A direction is cleared only when the internal receipt points outside initiative/content output, the external receipt points to a dated type: research file under wiki/research/, both use <path>#<quote-anchor>, and graph-audit verifies them. Otherwise set strategy_state: parked, keep the gap in Parked recommendations, and do not present the direction as ratified strategy.

The sections: Diagnosis · Direction · What we're not doing · This quarter · Review rhythm (one line: scored weekly by review, revisited quarterly) · Claim receipts (the calculation, exact quoted receipt, or founder-stated/unverified label for each factual or causal line). Reopen every cited source at write time, then update index.md, link hub/business.md, and append ## [date] vision | <one-line direction> to log.md.

On first canonical write, replace the vision-stub link with the vision link in both index.md and hub/business.md, then delete wiki/business/vision-stub.md. Treat those four changes as one close: the stub never leaves a dangling catalog or hub entry. Reconcile baton.md and any pending pointer that names the retired stub in the same linked-state transaction.

A REVISION of an existing vision runs the same interview on what changed, and the change itself gets tested: a direction change that is hard to reverse, surprising, and a real tradeoff earns a decision row with its why. The old vision text survives inside the file under "Superseded ": the business remembers what it used to believe.

Mandatory filing gate

1. Run scripts/graph-audit on every touched durable file.
2. Fix every violation and rerun it. The vision write and any state projection remain incomplete until it exits zero.

Done when: the file exists at the charter's path, the log carries the row, and (revisions) the supersession is on the record.

Step 5: Hand off

Two lines: the direction in one sentence, and the ONE next move: an active initiative gets re-checked against the new vision by review, a fresh start goes to plan ("what's the plan for ").

Done when: the founder knows what the file says and what reads it next.