Reading guide: how the deep dives fit together
Status: Series v0.1, July 2026 Foundation: All papers in this series elaborate the aigile working paper v0.1. Terminology follows the working paper glossary, which is canonical.
Purpose
The working paper establishes the aigile framework as a whole. Each paper in this series takes one load-bearing element, develops it to full depth, specifies its protocols normatively, illustrates it with a running example, and names the derivative artifacts (playbook chapters, slides, website sections, tooling requirements) that should be built from it.
The running example
All papers share one worked example: Orderly, a fictional B2B order-management SaaS built by a team of four humans and a set of coding agents. Orderly begins the series in collaborative mode and, across the papers, earns increasing agent autonomy. Reusing one example keeps the papers interlocking: the constitution written in Paper 03 is the one violated in Paper 05 and amended in Paper 08.
The papers
| # | Title | Elaborates working paper | Depends on |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | The Backward Edge: Foundations and Diagnosis | Parts I and II | none |
| 02 | The Three-Layer Artifact Model and Layered Truth | Section 6 | 01 |
| 03 | The Constitution as Versioned Law | Section 7 | 02 |
| 04 | Review Economics and the Increment Sizing Rule | Sections 5 and 8 | 02 |
| 05 | Deviation and Drift: Keeping Map and Territory Aligned | Sections 9 and 10 | 02, 03, 04 |
| 06 | The Validation Architecture and the Human Anchor | Sections 12 and 14 | 04 |
| 07 | The Authority Matrix and Graduated Autonomy | Section 13 | 03, 06 |
| 08 | Retrospectives, Gardening, and the Comprehension Budget | Sections 5.3 and 11 | 02, 05 |
| 09 | The Craft of Slicing | Section 8 step 2 and the sizing rule | 04, 05, 06 |
Common paper structure
Every paper follows the same skeleton so derivative artifacts can be produced mechanically:
- Abstract and position in the framework
- The problem in full (why this element exists)
- The mechanism (conceptual treatment)
- Normative protocol (numbered rules; the part playbooks quote verbatim)
- Orderly worked example
- Failure modes and anti-patterns
- Metrics
- Open questions
- Derivative artifacts this paper feeds
Reading order
Sequential order works. Readers building a playbook should start at 04 and 05. Readers preparing executive material should read 01, 06, and 07. Readers designing tooling should read 02, 03, and 05.