End-User Guidelines

Use these guides to adopt ADD and carry out the first artifact change. They support humans working with AI and consumer agents adopting from a GitHub Release and configuring their own harness.

Guide	Purpose
Change tiers	Choose small, medium or large, and apply the records, commits, gates and version rule of the tier.
Minimal change scaffold	Start a one-artifact outcome with complete phase, task and evidence structure.
Getting started	Choose a knowledge workspace, identify an artifact, and complete the first change.
System flows	Define named journeys, reusable models, interactions, supporting evidence and flow maintenance.
Change impact	Read a tiered impact answer, use it in each phase, and keep it precise without a manual graph.
Units of work	Group artifact changes around one outcome and record shared validation knowledge.
Evidence records	Record checks, consequential claims and publication assertions with explicit sources and verification limits.
Writing artifacts	Write identity, change and version records, requirements with IDs, specifications, decisions, task plans, and check them with the validator.
Visual representations	Select, write, check and maintain tables, diagrams and derived views of knowledge.
Visual examples	Follow worked examples that turn real artifact text into better representations.
Adopting from a release	Follow the adoption guide by hand, or give an AI agent the ready request to adopt a verified release and set up its harness.
Runbooks	Follow ordered steps after a merge, when the protected branch moves, after an amendment, when a change stops, to reverse a version, for a live check and for a failed check.
Working with AI	Required role capabilities, focused project instructions, plan approval, and team merge review.

ADD guidance is installed under docs/artifact-driven by default. Project artifacts live separately under docs/artifacts. The first holds reusable knowledge about the approach; the second holds your project's governed knowledge.