chord-initiation

name

chord-initiation

description

Stage 1 of the Chord workflow (chord-initiation → chord-prototype → chord-architect → lattice-orchestrator ×K) — Tone in plural: the portfolio initiation of one problem with several complete answers. Commission a portfolio, research to enumerate, generate ~N candidate bets, voice K uncorrelated ones with a champion each, and write the two-tier philosophy & stories. Inherits tone-initiation by reference. Invoke when the operator says "chord," "chord this," "portfolio this," "build several answers," or when a keystone fork resists resolution by research and dialogue.

Chord — Initiation

Chord is Stage 11's portfolio-creation workflow — Tone in plural. Where Tone carries one idea to one loved prototype and one build contract, Chord carries one problem to K complete, shipped, instrumented solutions and lets reality pick. The entry bar is the keystone inversion: a fork that dialogue, research, and a venture-partner grilling cannot settle stops being a blocker and becomes the axis of variation. If one shape is obviously right with cosmetic variants, the fork isn't wide enough — run Tone. The portfolio buys effectiveness, not speed: candidates are not racing, and every design choice below spends one currency — information per unit of operator attention.

Inheritance (the load-bearing rule)

On invoke, read ~/.claude/skills/tone-initiation/SKILL.md in full. It is the base contract: its pipeline norms, principles, phases, touchpoint discipline, and layout all bind here unless this skill explicitly overrides them. If it is missing, stop and say so — never improvise the base. Then skim the sibling chord skills, exactly as Tone's stages skim theirs. Tone and Chord are coupled on purpose: an improvement to Tone is an improvement to Chord the moment the skills sync.

Overrides. This skill replaces its base in exactly three places; everything else is additive. (A Tone edit landing in one of these should check both families.)

1. Research saturation — enumerate, not validate: stop when new searches stop yielding new candidate shapes.
2. Layout — portfolio root with per-candidate subtrees, in place of the singular project layout.
3. Phase 3–4 stories — two-tier (shared core + per-candidate), in place of one singular stories file.

The plural norms (additive to Tone's pipeline norms)

1. One problem, one philosophy, K solutions. The one thing, the people, and the problem contract are singular. Two candidates needing different philosophies are different projects — split the commission.
2. Uncorrelated failures. Name the one thing that kills it per candidate; choose a set whose kill-conditions differ — including distribution decorrelation: candidates that all reach users through the operator's personal network are correlated where attention binds hardest.
3. One problem, honestly held. The shared acceptance core is written before any candidate exists. It is a problem-honesty instrument, not a stopwatch — it guarantees all K still answer the same problem, never that their clocks or fleets match.
4. The membrane. The operator is the only channel between candidates. Problem-level facts propagate to all by default; solution-level ideas cross only at operator discretion. Champion topology makes this physical.
5. The bench. The N−K unselected candidates are reserves, not rejects — a candidate that dies at any pre-ship gate can be replaced from the bench at operator discretion.
6. Batched attention. Every human touchpoint sees all K side-by-side, once. K gates in sequence is how the operator drowns.
7. Pre-registration. Kill and double-down criteria per candidate are written before anything ships (authored at chord-architect; honored from here forward).
8. Chord creates; operations reads. The resolution book is a handoff artifact, not a standing loop inside Chord.

Amendments to the shared core apply to all candidates simultaneously or none, and are logged. Candidate-level artifacts stay freely living, exactly as in Tone.

The phases

C0 — Commission (plural). Tone's Phase 0, with the fork logic inverted. One problem, agreed and named, with a portfolio home (a portfolio repo for shared artifacts; candidate repos spawn at build — confirm name and location, never default). The Keystone Decisions table splits two ways: resolvable forks get resolved as in Tone; irresolvable ones are captured as candidate variation axes. Entry-bar check, honestly applied: if no fork survives as genuinely irresolvable, or the space can't support ~10 distinct shapes, say so and route to Tone — a commission correctly turned away is a success. Venture-partner offered at the portfolio level when the commission is a business.

C1 — Research (enumeration-oriented). Tone's Phase 1 dimensions survive wholesale; a fourth is mandatory: the solution landscape — how many genuinely distinct shapes others have used against this problem and its analogues. The brief inverts from validate to enumerate, and saturation is redefined (override 1): stop when new searches stop yielding new candidate shapes.

C2 — Enumerate (new). Generate ~N candidates (default ≈10), each a one-card bet: name · core assumption · who pays and roughly how · the one thing that kills it · its natural distribution channel. Fan out generation across deliberately different lenses — personas, wedges, business models; cross-model seeds where they add genuine diversity. Distinctness discipline: swap the pitch between two cards and you should still tell them apart. Resist honestly card-by-card — weak candidates die here, where dying is cheap.

C3 — Voicing (gate). The portfolio pick, with the operator: select K (default 3–5) under uncorrelated failures — kill-condition diversity and distribution decorrelation weighed together. The selection artifact is PORTFOLIO.md: the chosen candidates, their axes of variation, their kill-conditions, why this set spans the space, and the bench. Explicit check: is this K different bets, or one bet voiced K ways? Each selection gets its premises signed (venture-partner per candidate, proportional) and a champion: a dedicated agent owning the candidate from here through build-contract handoff. Inside c11, champions are surfaces of one champions pane — one pane, K surfaces — with this conductor in its own pane; champions never read each other's surfaces (norm 4, enforced by topology). A bench promotion mints a fresh champion. Each champion writes its candidate's ECONOMICS.md where economics are load-bearing.

C4 — Philosophy & stories (two-tier). One PHILOSOPHY.md at the portfolio root — shared, referenced never copied, by every candidate. Stories split (override 3): the shared core (problem-level stories and ACs — the problem-honesty rulebook, identical for all, IDs like AC-1) and per-candidate stories (candidate-prefixed IDs like B/AC-4, authored by each champion). One batched stories review (touchpoint): the operator reads all K side-by-side, once.

Layout (the portfolio's)

<portfolio>/
├── sequence/
│   ├── run-state.md          # ONE portfolio run-state; per-candidate status rolls up here
│   ├── research/             # the enumeration-oriented dossier
│   └── USER_STORIES.md       # the shared core (AC-n)
├── PORTFOLIO.md              # voicing artifact: the K, their axes, kill-conditions, the bench
├── PHILOSOPHY.md             # singular, shared by reference
├── candidates/<X>/           # per candidate: stories (X/AC-n), ECONOMICS.md, prototypes/ …
│                             # (own repo spawns at build; this is the pre-build home)
└── CLAUDE.md                 # pointers to every root artifact, never copies

Handoff

Champions invoke chord-prototype per candidate — proportionality dialed down (divergence was spent at the candidate level), iteration batched portfolio-wide. The conductor keeps run-state.md current and its own lane clear for the operator.