What You Get

An IFD engagement produces tangible, durable artifacts that your team owns and maintains independently after the engagement concludes. These are not slide decks or strategic recommendations — they are working assets embedded in your development workflow.

A Living Documentation Corpus

Your codebase receives a structured documentation system organized according to the Diataxis framework. This includes:

• Explanations that capture the architectural reasoning, system context, and design rationale behind your key systems
• How-to guides that document implementation patterns and operational procedures your team follows
• Reference materials that define API contracts, data models, configuration schemas, and interface specifications
• Tutorials that provide onboarding paths for new team members

The documentation is living — designed to be updated as the system evolves, not produced once and abandoned. The structure ensures it remains navigable at scale.

Design Decision Documents

Every significant architectural decision made during the engagement is recorded in a Design Decision Document (DDD). Each document captures:

• The scenario that required a decision
• The options that were evaluated, with trade-offs for each
• The recommendation based on technical analysis
• The actual decision and the driver behind it

Your team inherits a complete, inspectable record of architectural reasoning. When requirements change or constraints shift, the DDDs tell you not only what was decided but why — so you can assess whether the original reasoning still holds.

AI-Consumable Skills

Your project receives a set of Skills — structured artifacts that encode your team's conventions, constraints, and patterns in a form that AI tools can consume directly:

• Practice-level Skills that encode the IFD methodology itself, applicable across your projects
• Project-level Skills tailored to your specific technology stack, naming conventions, architectural patterns, and domain terminology

Skills ensure that AI-generated code reflects your team's deliberate choices rather than generic patterns. They persist across AI sessions, developers, and tool changes.

A CLAUDE.md Project Entry Point

Your repository receives a CLAUDE.md file — the AI entry point that orients any AI agent to the full architectural context. It links to the documentation corpus, active DDDs, Skills, and project conventions. Every AI session starts with complete context instead of a blank slate.

Templates and Methodology Transfer

The engagement includes the templates, structures, and practices your team needs to sustain IFD independently:

• DDD templates for recording future architectural decisions
• Documentation templates aligned with the Diataxis framework
• Skill authoring guidance for creating new Skills as your project evolves
• Design session facilitation patterns for running altitude-gated design conversations

The goal is self-sufficiency. After the engagement, your team has the tools and practices to continue capturing intent without ongoing external support.