Methodology · Shape Up for one

Fixed time. Variable scope. Honest hills.

Heliostat adapts Shape Up (by Ryan Singer at Basecamp) for the developer who has no team to sanity-check them. It keeps the four phases and the vocabulary, swaps out everything that assumes a team, and adds a fifth phase up front — Think — the mind-map workspace where pitches start as raw ideas before they're worth shaping.

STEP 00 · think

Think first. Pitch later.

Half-formed ideas don't deserve a pitch yet. /think is a per-user mind-map of free-form notes — markdown bodies with #tags, [[wikilinks]] between notes, folders, inline images, YouTube embeds, callouts, and tasklists that toggle in place. Bare URLs auto-resolve to their page titles. When a cluster of notes feels like a real idea, select it and Extract — Heliostat seeds a Pitch from those notes so you can shape it next.

"An idea you can't link to anything else isn't an idea yet."

STEP 01 · pitch

Shape it before you commit.

A pitch is not a ticket. It's appetite (T-shirt size), problem, rough solution, rabbit holes, and no-gos. The Senior — an AI reviewer — challenges every one of those steps before you mark it ready.

"A pitch is 5 steps, not a sentence."

STEP 02 · commit

Pick the cycle. Then close the kitchen.

Move pitches into a weeks-long budget bar. When you start the cycle you've picked a direction — mid-cycle you can still add pitches or cut scopes, but every change is a deliberate call, not a drift.

"What you don't build is a feature."

STEP 03 · build

Climb the hill. Log the detours.

Pitches break into scopes. Scopes live on a hill — uphill (figuring it out) or downhill (making it happen). No percentage bars lie to you. Unplanned work gets logged at the door, not hidden.

"A scope that hasn't moved in a week is a question, not a status."

STEP 04 · cooldown

Rest. Then learn something real.

1–7 days between cycles. The Retro Coach — a separate AI surface from the Senior — walks you through what shipped, what got cut, and what your unplanned hours told you. Drafts lessons in your voice and indexes them across cycles so the next pitch can see them. You keep the ones that sting.

"A lesson you won't say out loud is a lesson you don't believe."

A primer · the hill

UPHILL

Unknowns bigger than the answer. Spike here.

SUMMIT

You can see the shape. Commit to it.

DOWNHILL

Only execution risk left. Work through it steadily.

Glossary

Think A per-user mind-map at /think — markdown notes with #tags, [[wikilinks]], folders, image attachments, callouts, and embeds. Where pitches start as raw thoughts. Notes can be exported as a tar.gz of .md files or shared individually via a /u//n// URL.

T-shirt size A time budget you set before designing the solution. Not an estimate. "I'll spend 2 weeks on this, max." Heliostat shows it as S / M / L / XL.

Pitch The written artifact you draft during Pitch phase. Five required fields (Problem, T-shirt size, Solution, Rabbit Holes, No Gos) plus optional Other Notes. Status flow: raw → ready → in-cycle → archived.

The Senior A tough but fair AI collaborator that reads your pitch and pushes back. Always available while pitching — flags thin pitches, challenges weak sections, and can propose rewrites you accept or dismiss.

Retro Coach A second AI surface, scoped to the Cooldown phase. Reads the cycle's outcomes — what shipped, what cut, hill positions, unplanned hours — and runs a guided retrospective conversation. Drafts lessons you can keep, edit, or throw out.

Lessons Short, opinionated takeaways drafted out of the Retro Coach conversation. Indexed across all your cycles so a future pitch can pull from them.

Cycle A fixed work period (default 2 weeks, configurable 2–6). Adding pitches or cutting scopes mid-cycle is possible but deliberate — it's a call you make, not a drift.

Cooldown 1–7 days between cycles for pitching, bug fixes, cleanup, and the retrospective. Length is per-user, set in Settings.

Commit Picking the pitches you'll work on this cycle and tagging each one. The decision ritual.

Scope An independent slice of a committed pitch that can be built, integrated, and finished on its own. Tag it with a short word; branches and commits with that word are matched automatically.

Scope tag The short word you attach to a scope (e.g. auth). Heliostat matches branches like feat/auth-login and commits like fix(auth): … back to that scope — no manual logging required.

Hill chart A visualization of confidence: uphill = still figuring it out, downhill = executing known work. 0–100, midpoint at 50.

Scope hammer Shape Up's term for the trim-scope-to-fit-time reflex: cut features, not deadlines, to ship. "What's the simplest version that improves on the baseline?"

~ (tilde) Prefix for nice-to-have items. Cut first when time runs short.

Circuit breaker Unfinished work doesn't carry forward — it gets re-pitched or dropped.

Baseline What exists today. The new thing just has to beat this.

Unplanned work Anything that pulls you off your committed work mid-cycle. Log it honestly (or let auto-matching flag unmatched commits as interruptions).

How this differs from team Shape Up

Team Shape Up	Solo adaptation	Why
6-week cycles	2-week default (configurable 2–6)	Less throughput solo; shorter cycles = faster feedback
Betting table meeting	Written self-review during Commit phase	No stakeholders to convince, but the decision ritual matters
Peer pushback on pitches	The Senior (AI) challenges your pitch before you commit weeks	Solo means no teammate to call out a thin pitch; the Senior substitutes
Big batch / Small batch teams	One commitment mode per cycle — don't mix	Context switching kills solo velocity
Two parallel tracks	Alternating hats — pitch during cooldown, build during cycle	Can't run two tracks with one person
Kick-off message	The pitch is the kick-off	You know what you're doing
Hill chart for team visibility	Hill chart for self-awareness	Nobody's asking for status, but it helps you see where you're stuck

Concepts that apply unchanged

Fixed time, variable scope the deadline is real; cut scope, not quality

Size over estimates decide how much time it's worth, pick a T-shirt size, then design to fit

Pitching before building think before coding, even briefly

Rabbit holes and No Gos name the risks and exclusions up front

Scope hammering your primary shipping tool

Circuit breaker kills zombie projects

Baseline comparison "does this beat what exists today?"

~ nice-to-haves the pressure relief valve

Influences

Shape Up

Basecamp / Ryan Singer

The whole vocabulary — pitch, appetite, hill, cooldown. Free book at basecamp.com/shapeup.