1 min lesson
The trap is treating these as gates you pass once
Rebuild the main list in "The trap is treating these as gates you pass once", then say what each item changes.
Step 1 of 2
The trap is treating these as gates you pass once. In practice discovery keeps running - your first thin version teaches you the bottleneck was somewhere else and you loop back. The discipline is making that loop fast, not pretending you nailed the diagnosis on day one.
- Discovery produces a baseline and a target metric, in writing.
- Design produces a chosen workflow tied to that metric.
- Rapid deploy produces a running end-to-end skeleton, not a deck.
- Hardening produces tracing, evals, monitoring and a rollback path.
- Productizing produces a pattern Cursor can reuse elsewhere.
Interview move
In the decomposition round you'll be handed an ambiguous enterprise problem and asked to scope it. Run this exact loop out loud. Start by refusing to solve it until you've defined the metric, then propose a walking-skeleton MVP before any hardening. Interviewers are grading whether you reach for structure under ambiguity.