north-star

/north-star — turn the founder's feelings and intentions on day 1 into a locked day-1 artifact

When to use

At the very beginning of a new project, business, or pivot, before brand, scope, or implementation work. Or later, in drift mode, when the existing north-star isn't working anymore and the founder explicitly wants to revise.

Skip for: features (those use the project's feature skill if one exists), pure technical decisions (use ADRs directly), marketing campaigns (downstream).

What it produces

Three artifacts:

1. <project>/docs/00-north-star.md — a short paragraph (3 to 5 sentences) capturing what / why / for-whom, the approach, and the philosophical posture. YAML frontmatter at the top makes the paragraph machine-readable for downstream apps. Real-world mission statements (Patagonia, Amazon) are 1 to 3 sentences; aim there. The 3-to-5-sentence count is the authoritative bar; line count is incidental.

2. <project>/docs/build-logs/north-star-v{N}.md — full session record: founder's verbatim answers to each interview question, scratch synthesis attempts, cross-model review findings, draft evolution v1 to vN with rejection reasons, and a consolidated Positioning context for downstream skills section.

3. (Optional) 1 to 3 foundational ADRs in <project>/docs/adrs/ for durable bright-line decisions surfaced during the interview that warrant separable, citable records.

Downstream skills (e.g. feature) read (1) and (2) at requirements-gathering time to check alignment before scoping new work.

Hard rules

1. Self-interview, not interrogation. Capture the founder's literal language. Don't paraphrase, don't generate from templates, don't put words in their mouth.
2. Pointed questions, not vague ones. Each question elicits a felt answer, not an analytical one.
3. No drift into brand, voice, pricing, scope, or marketing. All downstream. If the founder veers, redirect with a script: "That's worth holding onto, but for now I'm parking it. Right now I'm only after what / why / who and the deepest beliefs. We'll come back to that." Park stray thoughts in build-log notes.
4. Short artifact. 3 to 5 sentences in the paragraph. Resist the urge to produce a polished document; polish comes through months of iteration.
5. Read aloud or it doesn't ship. The founder reads the paragraph aloud. If it sounds like them, lock. If not, edit.
6. Founder edits the file directly once a draft exists. Iterate the first draft conversationally in chat. The moment a working draft exists, open docs/00-north-star.md in their editor (code <path>, $EDITOR <path>, or whatever they use) and let them edit there. Quality jumps once the founder is in their own editor; chat-based list confirmations are explicitly forbidden.
7. Positive commitments only in the artifact. No "we don't" or "we are not for" framing in the paragraph; that reads judgy. Specific anti-patterns to avoid in synthesis:
   • Defensive hedging in the headline (e.g. "...not get skinny" — even if the founder said it, putting it in the headline turns the orientation into an argument with the customer's possible motivations)
   • "We don't do X" framing in beliefs (replace with positive commitments that imply the bright line)
   • "Who we are NOT for" as a section heading (use "What to expect" or fold into positioning context as expectation-setting) Bright lines and counter-personas live in the build log's positioning-context section.
8. Locked-but-revisable. Drift-mode re-run requires the founder to explicitly name what's drifted; old version is archived, not deleted.
9. Ideal pace is one sitting, no hard cap. Most runs land in one focused session. Some genuinely take two. There is no enforced limit; if a session is going long, take a break and resume rather than rushing.
10. Stop-or-go is allowed. If Q3 (founder-market fit) makes the founder realize they shouldn't be building this, surface that, don't push through to a locked artifact. (This rule is designed but not yet exercised in real-world use.)
11. Cross-model review is required at lock; optional at any point during the run. Mid-flight reviews (single different-model agent at any point the interviewer or founder wants a sanity check) caught real drift in the inaugural run. The pre-lock review is a fan-out across multiple models (Sonnet + Opus + Haiku) for confidence on the final paragraph. See Phase 4.
12. Build log uses verbatim quotes for founder language. When the interviewer's notes summarize what the founder said, mark it explicitly as a summary; the verbatim founder answers are the source of truth for downstream skills. Don't paraphrase silently.
13. Founder overwhelm is a course-correction trigger. If the founder says "this is a lot," "this is overwhelming," or similar, stop the current approach and find a smaller surface. Don't push through. The most common moment this fires is when the interviewer is presenting list-mode confirmations; the right correction is to skip lists and let the founder react to a draft instead.