domain-modeling

Domain Modeling

Actively build and sharpen the project's domain model as you design. This is the active discipline — challenging terms, inventing edge-case scenarios, and writing the glossary and decisions down the moment they crystallise. (Merely reading CONTEXT.md for vocabulary is not this skill — that's a one-line habit any skill can do. This skill is for when you're changing the model, not just consuming it.)

This applies to any repo built around a domain — software, or a non-code repo: one whose deliverable is not software but documents, operations, research, or knowledge. The test is what the repo produces, not what it contains — supporting scripts that serve the documents (converters, senders, digests) don't make a repo a code repo, and an app or library is a code repo no matter how much markdown it holds. Where the steps below say code, read the repo's source of truth: in a non-code repo that's the canonical documents, data, or records. Likewise an ADR records any consequential decision — a strategy, policy, or structural choice — not only software architecture. In a non-code repo the model also includes the people the work is for, with, or about — captured in a single root PEOPLE.md roster. Code repos skip this; a cast of named individuals is almost never load-bearing context there.

File structure

Most repos have a single context:

/
├── CONTEXT.md
├── PEOPLE.md                         ← non-code repos only
├── agent-docs/
│   └── adr/
│       ├── 0001-event-sourced-orders.md
│       └── 0002-postgres-for-write-model.md
└── src/

If a CONTEXT-MAP.md exists at the root, the repo has multiple contexts. The map points to where each one lives:

/
├── CONTEXT-MAP.md
├── PEOPLE.md                         ← non-code repos only; always at the root, never per-context
├── agent-docs/
│   └── adr/                          ← system-wide decisions
├── src/
│   ├── ordering/
│   │   ├── CONTEXT.md
│   │   └── docs/adr/                 ← context-specific decisions
│   └── billing/
│       ├── CONTEXT.md
│       └── docs/adr/