LifeOS

Principle № 06 · Method

Articulate Done Before You Build

Write down what done means, as criteria a tool can check, before the work starts. That document is the hill the work climbs.

A machining fixture with a precision template held above a partly cut blank, the template outline lit teal and traced down onto the blank, the unworked half cut away into a bone-grey drawing.
Fig. P06The outline of done is fixed before the first cut

The most common failure in AI work is building before anyone knows what finished looks like. So LifeOS writes it down first. Before the work starts, what done means becomes a short list of criteria, each one specific enough that a tool can check it.

Hard-to-vary criteria

The standard comes from the physicist David Deutsch’s idea of a hard-to-vary explanation, where every detail does a job. A good criterion works the same way: every word earns its place, and if you remove or change one, the criterion no longer describes done. “The page looks good” is easy to vary and impossible to check. “The page loads in a real browser at phone width with no horizontal scroll” can be checked.

Criteria that hold across a whole domain beat criteria about one example. “Every link on the site resolves” is stronger than “the About link works.”

The ISA

That document is the ISA, the Ideal State Artifact. It holds the goal in your own words, what’s implied, what’s out of scope, what must not happen, and the criteria themselves. It is the hill the work climbs, and it changes as the work learns things: criteria get added, split, tightened or dropped.

Working against it follows the scientific method. Each attempt is a conjecture about how to reach done, and each check is a chance to refute it. It applies to any work: an essay, a trip plan and a database migration all get the same treatment.

In practice

You ask for a new page on your site. Before any code is written, the ISA says what the page must contain, which widths it must work at, which links must resolve, and that you see it before it goes live. The build is finished when every criterion is checked, and you can read exactly what was checked.

ISA System → One document that captures what 'done' looks like — the testable spec the Algorithm climbs toward. The Algorithm → One loop that routes each ask to the right intelligence, turns it into a testable spec, and climbs toward it. General Hill Climbing → Every goal is a hill; the system keeps picking the next move that closes the gap.