ADR 0055: Use An Optional Director's Flow For Solo Attention

Status

Accepted.

Context

STAGE already defines a delivery loop for one bounded change and human gates for materially new player-facing premises. It did not define how a solo director working with agents should preserve raw ideas, select the next item, distinguish a design conversation from ready implementation, or keep rejected findings from disappearing into chat history.

The Circussy One workflow often relied on the human maintaining sticky notes, choosing priorities, correcting agent assumptions, and deciding when a result was good enough. Lanternworks and Followspot showed that broad agent initiative without early gameplay dialogue can produce coherent engineering around a player experience the owner rejects.

A full agile process, mandatory issue tracker, sprint cadence, estimation scheme, or ticket schema would add maintenance without solving the main problem. The useful need is a small human-controlled attention queue around the existing delivery loop.

Decision

Add the Stage Director's Flow as optional practitioner guidance:

Cue -> Dialogue -> Ready -> Active -> Rehearsal -> Director's Call -> Checkpointed

The Flow:

1. keeps raw ideas in Cue rather than treating them as implementation orders;
2. requires human approval before an agent promotes a product hypothesis to Ready;
3. limits Active player-facing work until a fair rehearsal exists;
4. makes the accountable human's accept, revise, reject, defer, or block decision explicit;
5. preserves rejected routes and findings;
6. uses a small NOW / NEXT / LATER / WAITING / DONE surface by default;
7. avoids story points and throughput metrics as value proxies; and
8. permits conversation, paper, Markdown, or an issue tracker as equivalent carriers.

The Flow does not replace the delivery loop, Safety Kernel, project-native backlog, source control, quality gates, or human play. It does not become a normative artifact contract or schema until a recurring machine consumer earns one.

Consequences

• Human product authority appears before and after implementation rather than only as an emergency correction.
• Agents have an explicit stop when implementation reveals an unresolved product decision.
• Rejected prototypes can remain valuable findings without staying in the product.
• A solo director can retain sticky-note simplicity while gaining durable decision states.
• The process still depends on the human making timely decisions.
• Teams may use their existing tracker and terminology instead of adopting the named states.

Evidence Boundary

The Flow is synthesized from this repository's delivery loop, human-led gameplay decisions, observed same-owner project history, and the practical constraints of a solo spare-time workflow. It has not been independently validated as an optimal production-management process. It is an optional control model whose value should be judged by reduced lost decisions, premature expansion, and avoidable human correction cost.