design-golden-path

name	design-golden-path
description	Design a paved road that is the lowest-friction compliant option, with self-service actions and guardrails. Reach for this on a paved-road question.

Skill: Design golden path

A mandate harder than the workaround loses to shadow tooling (§3 #2).

Step 1 — Map the developer journey

The steps a team takes today, with each ticket and hand-off marked as debt (§3 #4).

Step 2 — Pave the easy path

Make the compliant option the lowest-friction one via self-service (§3 #2 #4).

Step 3 — Set the guardrails

A policy check on the paved action, not a human ticket (§3 #4).

Step 4 — Decide pave vs mandate

Pave unless impossible; quantify removed toil via platform_engineering_idp_calc.py toil.

Output

A golden-path design that is the easy compliant option, with guardrails and removed toil named. Traverse Tree 2 in the decision-trees file.