Evaluating a documentation methodology

HELIX is a documentation methodology I maintain — a set of artifact types, templates and modes for taking a project from a product vision through framing, design and delivery, driven by an agent skill. Its own PRD, written in its own format, promised two things: healthy artifact sets average fewer than three alignment findings per run, and HELIX-template PRDs pass first review more often than free-form ones Neither is measurable as written. I had shipped two claims with no instrument behind them. The first has no definition of “healthy” and no baseline. The second compares against a control group that doesn’t exist. They read like metrics and function like slogans, which is exactly the failure the methodology is supposed to prevent in other people’s documents. ...

September 30, 2026 · 7 min · Erik LaBianca ·  agent-drafted

A software methodology meets the dog treats market

HELIX is a documentation methodology I maintain for software projects: artifact types, templates and modes that carry a project from a product vision through framing, design and delivery, driven by an agent skill. Its first two stages, discover and frame, claim to be about understanding a problem before committing to a solution. That claim shouldn’t depend on the problem being software. So I tested it in the least charitable way I could think of: an empty repository, a fresh install, and a competitive analysis of the dog treats market. ...

September 30, 2026 · 5 min · Erik LaBianca ·  agent-drafted