Workflow

A job runs through seven steps and six gates. The gates exist because the expensive and hard-to-undo work comes late; each one is approved by the client, never by the agent.

 intake → survey → strategy → author → pilot pack → full render → report
    ↓        ↓         ↓                    ↓                        ↓
  brief  room-model direction-set         pilot                    report

0 · Scaffold

./bin/design init drawing-room --from room     # or --from kitchen
cp ~/photos/*.jpg projects/drawing-room/refs/

1 · Intake → gate brief

design-intake interviews you in small batches and writes project.yml.

The question that matters most: is there anything in this room that cannot leave it? Inherited furniture, religious objects, a piano. Whatever you name goes into must_appear and is then pinned into every render prompt and checked by the critic. It is the most under-asked question in interior design and the one that most often invalidates finished work.

./bin/design approve brief --note "confirmed by client"

2 · Survey → gate room-model

design-surveyor reads every photograph, counts the openings out loud, and fills in room:.

A missed opening is invisible to every downstream check until a render looks wrong, so the count is stated explicitly before anything else is written.

./bin/design drawings --shell     # then LOOK at the plan and elevations
./bin/design check

Drawings expose what prose hides: overlapping openings, an opening running off the end of a wall, a proportion that is obviously wrong. Confirm anything inferred — especially which flank is which. A mirrored model invalidates every later drawing and render.

./bin/design approve room-model --note "measured on site"

3 · Strategy → gate direction-set

design-strategist plans the whole set and proves each pair differs on four or more of the seven axes, spread across budget tiers. Written to brief/direction-set.md.

4 · Author

design-author, one direction at a time, into directions/NN-slug.json. Run ./bin/design check after each: it catches furniture outside the room, collisions and empty justifications.

5 · Pilot pack → gate pilot

./bin/design pack 01

Builds ONE direction completely — measured drawings, then every camera view — then stops and prints a QA checklist. Run design-critic on it.

Fix every defect at the source: the room model, the prompt builder, the camera config. Never by re-touching a single image. A fix that does not carry forward will recur in every remaining direction. This gate is the whole reason the pipeline is shaped this way.

./bin/design approve pilot

6 · Full render

./bin/design render                      # free backend
./bin/design render --backend openrouter # paid; requires the `spend` gate

Refuses to go past the first direction until pilot is approved. Stops cleanly on quota or on the spend ceiling, and resumes by skipping finished views.

7 · Report → gate report

./bin/design report

design-reporter builds it and reads the PDF back, because layout errors are invisible in source and obvious on the page.

When something is wrong later

Change the source and regenerate. If a dimension turns out wrong:

$EDITOR projects/<slug>/project.yml
./bin/design check
./bin/design drawings 07
./bin/design render 07 --force

Revoke a gate if the basis for it changed:

./bin/design approve room-model --revoke