Practice
The Method says what the pieces are. These pages say what to do on Monday morning. Each one is a sequence of steps with copy-paste prompts for any AI coding assistant. None of them needs a particular tool.
Pick your path
| Your situation | Start here |
|---|---|
| Empty folder, new idea | New project: interview, spec, cascade documents, sentinel, verification, first feature |
| A codebase that exists and needs discipline | Existing project: cold read, audit, spec from code, sentinel, verification, oracle tests, remediation |
| You inherited or just joined a codebase | Join a codebase: a read-only, one-hour briefing |
| Moving a system to a new stack | Migrate to a new stack: audit the source, refine, bootstrap the target |
| Not sure what you have | Orient: read what exists, or ground the idea before specifying |
| Want the reasoning behind the structure | Structural disciplines |
| Existing system already under spec and verification | Remediate an existing system |
| Structural checks (complexity, duplication, dead code, cycles) at the right moment | Run structural gates and remediate: pre-commit, pre-push, CI, and a safe remediation loop |
New to the whole thing? Grade a codebase first with the free audit at pragmaworks.dev/audit, then pick a row above.
The stages, in neutral names
The flow has the same shape on every path. The workshop at pragmaworks.dev uses a metalworking vocabulary for the same stages; these pages use plain names.
| Stage here | What happens | Workshop name |
|---|---|---|
| Orient | Read what exists, or make the idea concrete | Heating |
| Specify | Spec, cascade documents, sentinel | Mold |
| Build | Verification layer in place, features built under it | Temple |
| Disciplines | Structural disciplines applied and enforced | Temper |
| Harden | Non-functional gates on top of the structure | Harden |
| Remediate | Oracle tests, prioritized fixes, incremental replacement | Anneal |
Relation to the workflow recipes
The workflow recipes cover similar ground as tool-call sequences for ForgeCraft. The pages here are the tool-free versions, written as prompts you paste into any assistant.
| Practice page | Overlapping recipe |
|---|---|
| New project | New project, no spec and with spec |
| Existing project | Brownfield new feature |
| Join a codebase | Project takeover |
| Migrate to a new stack | Migration |
Where the concepts are defined
The pages here use, and do not redefine, the terms defined in The Method: the rubric, spec completeness and the quality gates. Choose the recipes if you already use ForgeCraft, and these pages if you don’t.