DIIT-SPEC-001 · Define It In Text
If you can't describe what you want in plain text, you're not ready to build it.
Why the words have to come first.
Writing is thinking made visible. It's the cheapest, fastest, most honest prototype you'll ever make — and the one most people skip.
Text is the cheapest prototype.
Words cost nothing to change. Concrete costs everything. If the sentence is muddy, the thing you build from it will be muddier still.
Plain language has nowhere to hide.
A diagram can fake coherence. A dashboard can bury a missing decision. A paragraph drags the hard question out into the open where you have to answer it.
If you can't write it, you can't hand it off.
A clear paragraph is a contract a person, a team, or a machine can act on. Vagueness doesn't delegate — it multiplies as it travels.
You can't measure what you never defined.
Winning is a sentence before it is ever a number. Write down what good looks like, or you'll spend years optimizing the wrong thing beautifully.
Four things worth defining before you build them.
Each one is a full system in text — a mission, the questions you ask on a cadence, what a good answer looks like, the action a bad one triggers, and the metrics, challenges, and projects that fall out.