Project playbook

The transferable half of the retrospective: how to apply ScopeKite’s principles to your next project, as scenario checklists:

PROJECT_PLAYBOOK.md (repo — canonical)

• The invariant core — six things that are cheap early and brutal late: CI-enforced tenancy, one generated contract, machine-enforced boundaries, mutation semantics decided once, a uniform gate ladder, and a backlog as the scope pressure valve.
• Scenario A — greenfield: what to stand up in week one (standing instructions file, gates on an empty repo, first three ADRs, state vocabulary, walking skeleton) and what to defer without guilt.
• Scenario B — revamping a live product: the audit → target model → spec pack → slice execution sequence that changed ScopeKite’s center of gravity without a rewrite, plus how to retrofit the invariant core into a legacy codebase at the frontier.
• Scenario C — ground-up rewrite: when a clean-room boundary is required vs. overkill, how to run reference research without contaminating the implementation, and why a rewrite is a greenfield with better requirements — not a parity chase.

Each scenario ends with its expected failure modes, pulled from things that actually happened here rather than things that might.