# Methodology — Shape Up for one

> Fixed time. Variable scope. Honest hills.

Heliostat adapts [Shape Up](https://basecamp.com/shapeup) (Ryan Singer, 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.

## The five phases

### 1. Think

A per-user mind-map of markdown notes. Use it as a daily-notes scratchpad and a holding tank for ideas that aren't worth pitching yet. Notes support `#tags`, `[[wikilinks]]` between notes, folders, image attachments, callouts, YouTube embeds, and tasklists. Bare URLs auto-resolve to their page titles.

When a cluster of notes feels real, select them and Extract — Heliostat seeds a Pitch from them.

### 2. Pitch

A pitch is a written-up idea. Status flow: **raw → ready → in_cycle → archived**. Each pitch has:

- **Problem** — what's broken or missing
- **Size** — T-shirt size (S/M/L/XL) as a *time budget*, not an estimate
- **Solution** — the rough shape of what you'll build
- **Rabbit holes** — what you won't get into
- **No-gos** — what's explicitly out of scope

The Senior (AI) pushes back on thin pitches before you commit weeks to them.

### 3. Commit

Pick the pitches you'll actually ship this cycle. Tag each scope with a short token (e.g. `auth`) — that token is what wires GitHub commits back to the scope on the hill chart.

Cycle length is configurable, 2–6 weeks. Default is 2.

### 4. Build

The hill chart is the central artifact. Each scope has a position 0–100:

- **0–50** — the up-side. Figuring out the work. Unknowns ahead.
- **50–100** — the down-side. Executing. Unknowns are behind you.

You record check-ins as you make progress. Commits with the right tag auto-create check-ins; manual check-ins capture nuance commits can't.

Unplanned work (interruptions) gets logged separately. It doesn't displace the cycle — the hill chart keeps ticking — but it surfaces in the retrospective so you know whether the appetite was wrong or the urgency was manufactured.

### 5. Cooldown

A 1–7 day window after each cycle. Three things happen:

- **Cleanup tasks** — the small maintenance work you couldn't justify mid-cycle
- **Idea capture** — brain-dump cooldown ideas; promote good ones to pitches
- **Retrospective** — the Retro Coach (AI) walks you through what shipped, what got cut, what surprised you, what you'd do differently

The retro feeds **Lessons** — short distilled takeaways carried forward to future cycles.

## What's different from team Shape Up

| Team Shape Up | Heliostat (solo) |
| --- | --- |
| Betting table | You decide |
| Pitch presented to stakeholders | The Senior (AI) gives pushback |
| Retro discussed in a meeting | Retro Coach (AI) guides via chat |
| Multiple scopes shipped in parallel | One scope at a time, focused |
| 6-week default cycle | 2-week default (2–6 configurable) |

## Key claims

- **Fixed time, variable scope.** A cut scope is a feature, not a failure. It moves back to the pitch list as a draft.
- **No estimates.** T-shirt sizes are appetites — what you're willing to spend, not predictions.
- **Hill charts over Gantt.** Position on a hill answers "do I know what I'm doing yet?" — a more useful question than "what % done?".

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See [/tutorial.md](/tutorial.md) for the step-by-step walkthrough, or [/faq.md](/faq.md) for common questions about cycles, the Senior, and what happens when things slip.