Groundwork
A project operating system for agent-assisted work.
Phases, rituals, and a small shelf of living docs, so your project stays legible as it grows.
The docs are the truth. The dashboard is derived from them. Finished work leaves instead of piling up.
The proof
This page runs on it.
A methodology is easy to claim and hard to show. So the demo here is not a screenshot. It is a working dashboard you can walk around in.
It runs on Frond, an example project: a plant-care app, three months in. Every number below was read out of Frond’s markdown when this page was built. Nothing is typed by hand, so none of it can quietly go stale.
Watering reminders
8 of 12 tasks done
Go and read it. Every page is here: the open board, the strategy, the decisions, the questions still unanswered.
That is a project three months in. A new one starts empty, with the same shelf and nothing on it yet.
The one rule
Derived, never authored.
One rule holds the whole thing up. To change a page, you change its source doc. If the two ever disagree, the docs win.
A hand-maintained dashboard is a second thing to keep true. That is the exact failure this system exists to prevent.
And the corollary: work leaves.
A closed phase is distilled and deleted. Decisions go to the log. Behavior goes to the feature docs. The board itself is removed.
History lives in git and in a compact archive. It does not sit in your working set, which is why the system stays readable at any size.
How it works
Work happens in phases.
A phase is any chunk of work run through the rituals. It opens a board, does the work, and closes by distilling itself away.
Every phase runs in one of three modes. The mode sets how heavy the ritual is, what gets read first, and what the work is allowed to edit.
- ProductBuilds the thing.
A thesis, the build, then a walkthrough you drive point by point. The deepest ritual, because this is where the product ships.
- SystemTends the rules.
The docs, the work model, the dashboard itself. Always done with you, never solo.
- SideSweeps the small stuff.
Punch items, open questions, a research pass. Grows a thesis and it stops, because then it is product work.
The rituals are written for agent-assisted work. A briefing file is the standing context for a coding agent, and a session is one chat. The agent does the mechanical parts. You make the calls.
It is all plain markdown, so it works by hand too.
Get started
The first thirty minutes.
Copy the repo. The machinery is complete on arrival.
Run it, then open the dashboard. It boots with no drift alarms against an empty project.
Work the kickoff board. It ships already open, and it is the one-time bootstrap that turns the template into your project.
Close it. The kickoff deletes its own guide and README, so the template leaves no onboarding behind. What remains is your project.
Who built this
Shawn Talvacchia
I built Groundwork because my own projects kept going illegible. Context scattered, docs rotted, and the agent rebuilt what it had already forgotten.
This site is built on it too. The demo above is an example project, because a page about a work system should show you a product being built, not the page itself being built.