Spine · Product Conceiver & Director
Keeping the reasoning behind software decisions from disappearing
System 05 in the atlas · Decisions & continuity
AI-assisted software work has a quiet failure mode: the reasoning disappears. Decisions get made inside chat sessions, the code changes, and two weeks later nobody can say why the system is the way it is — because the conversation that decided it no longer exists.
Spine is a delivery-governance and knowledge-continuity platform built to fix that.
Where it came from
The product came out of direct experience, not market research. Building the NxSync platforms with AI assistance, we were moving faster than any team I had run — and losing the thread behind our own decisions at the same speed. The habits we adopted to fix it (write the problem first, work in bounded pieces, record decisions outside the chat, review before shipping) gradually hardened into software.
What it keeps
Spine keeps a structured record of the work around the work: decisions and the reasoning behind them, requirements and their traceability into changes, validation, context that survives between sessions, and a clean handover protocol between people and AI tools.
The point is continuity. A requirement should be traceable to the decision that shaped it and the work package that delivered it; a handover — human to AI or AI to human — should carry its context rather than losing it. Successive releases have added search, requirement traceability, project health views, agent governance, core protection and browser workflows, with test coverage expanding at each stage. It was used in the production of this website.
Current stage
Spine is production-ready at version 1.18.6 and in working use. Priorities being weighed for the next versions include richer agent governance and deeper traceability.
- 01
Business requirement
What the work must achieve
- 02
Decision
The reasoning, recorded outside the chat
- 03
Work package
A bounded, reviewable piece
- 04
Implementation
Built against the written intent
- 05
Validation
Checked before it ships
- 06
Handover
Context carried, not lost
What the work taught me
Building a governance product turned out to be the best governance training available. When your own tool demands acceptance criteria before implementation and a recorded reason for every decision, your standards rise to meet it. The habits matter more than the software — but software makes the habits survivable on a bad week.
Spine closes the loop: the discipline that started on building sites now keeps the reasoning behind software from disappearing.