The Fleet Metaphor
SDD carries a running metaphor: the work is a strike fleet. It isn’t decoration — the vocabulary appears in the prompts and gives every player one coherent mental model of its job. This page is the translation table: each metaphor term and the real concept it names. For the underlying theory see The Four Actors; for the loops in plain terms see the Overview.
The conceit
Section titled “The conceit”A spec is a territory — owned ground the fleet takes and holds. It persists: once taken, it stays on the map and is re-engaged only when it must change. A mission is the operation to take one territory; the frontier is the leading edge of all the ground held so far. The human is fleet command (the Council): they hold motive and accountability, and theirs are the only hands on ratification. Everyone else is a delegate carrying out command’s intent. The fleet learns from every mission, refits between them, and — across many fleets — improves the ships themselves.
The point of the metaphor is altitude discipline: it keeps “win this mission” separate from “is this the right campaign,” “is the fleet well-ordered,” “what did we learn,” and “should the ships themselves change.” Those are the five loops.
Command roles — the four actors
Section titled “Command roles — the four actors”Each actor wears a command hat. The actor names the concern; the fleet name the posture.
| Fleet role | Actor | Commands | Bar |
|---|---|---|---|
| Commander | Oracle | the campaign — which territories to pursue, what to abandon; the go/no-go to commit or stand down | scope, kill-or-ship |
| Battler | Builder | the mission — taking one territory | testability, coverage |
| Warden | Architect | the formation — keeping the fleet’s order of battle coherent | structural fit |
| Scanner | Strategist | the watch — reading combat reports for patterns and drafting doctrine | scope of doctrine, kill-or-keep a lesson |
Every role has two faces: forward (produce — press the attack) and backward (judge — hold the line at the gate). producer ≠ judge: the hand that strikes is never the hand that signs off.
The conductor holds the bridge — no separate line officer
Section titled “The conductor holds the bridge — no separate line officer”Earlier fleet vocabulary had a spawned “Operator” running each mission with no channel to command. That’s gone: fleet command’s own officer runs the mission from the bridge. The attended mission (start-mission) runs in the session that holds the user channel — there is no relay round-trip because command is already on the bridge. The one delegate that still runs a mission with no one aboard is the automaton (sdd-automaton): the same conductor, crewed for an unmanned sortie (an unattended scheduler, or fanning a queue of pre-cleared missions), which self-asserts within its leash and radios batched questions back rather than asking live.
- Bridge (conductor) — the officer at the helm, running the mission loop directly: resolves delegates, dispatches the production chain, grills command live, self-asserts within leash.
- Unmanned sortie (automaton) — the identical mission loop run with no one aboard; it never self-approves a mission for launch.
- Scanner in the Bunker (the doctrine delegate) — watches every mission reach a terminal state, drafts strategy from the combat logs, and surfaces it to command. It watches and drafts; it never fires (never writes lifecycle state).
- Warden on watch (the formation delegate) — audits the fleet’s order of battle post-mission, corpus-wide; self-clears the routine repositioning, escalates the rest as a new mission order.
The gateway is the signal station: it is where a request first reaches the fleet, and it is the only place a headless automaton’s questions surface to command (it holds no channel of its own — it relays).
The loops
Section titled “The loops”The five altitudes, each owned by a command role (the Overview has the same table in plain terms, with which loops are shipped today):
| Loop | Plain name | Role | Question |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mission | Build | Battler | win this mission |
| Campaign | Product | Commander | are we taking the right territories? |
| Formation | Structure | Warden | is the fleet well-ordered? |
| Doctrine | Process | Scanner | what did we learn about how to fight? |
| Forge | Harness | (the shipyard) | should the ships themselves change? |
Mission is the inner loop — one CR’s full lifecycle, across the explore and deliver phases. Campaign / Formation / Doctrine are the outer loops, run across missions: choosing which territories to take, keeping the formation sound, distilling doctrine. Forge sits above a single fleet entirely — the shipyard that refits the vessels from field corrections across every fleet (every installation), opt-in and privacy-gated. That last one is the recursion: SDD improving SDD.
Artifacts and acts
Section titled “Artifacts and acts”| Fleet term | Real concept |
|---|---|
| Territory | a spec — owned ground, taken and held; it persists (a noun, not an act) |
| Frontier | the leading edge of all held territory — the project spec as a whole |
| Mission | the operation to take one territory — one CR’s full lifecycle, across the explore and deliver phases (a verb) |
| Engagement | one iteration within a phase — a single producer⇄judge exchange |
| Segment | one autonomous conductor sitting between checkpoints (pause-mission / resume-mission); holds one or more engagements |
| Combat log | the mission’s mid-flight provenance: report / correction / halt entries beside the plan brief, deleted at retro once distilled |
| Ledger | the durable, sharded record beside the root spec: the run-start leash, every gate verdict, and Scanner-drafted strategy — never frozen, never deleted |
| Sealed orders | the frozen .feature of an approved/implemented node — the contract cannot be altered mid-mission; changing it requires command to break the seal (a ratified re-open) |
| The gate | the go/no-go: a backward-face verdict to advance the mission to its next phase (the spec’s lifecycle status). Command ratifies; the conductor may only self-assert within its leash |
| Scrub | a kill decision — stand the mission down and abandon the territory (deprecated) |
| The leash | how far the conductor may act on its own before it must signal command — derived per gate from reversibility, blast radius, novelty, and confidence |
Project vs inject
Section titled “Project vs inject”Two ways a delegate is committed, and the distinction matters:
- Project — spawn a fresh unit (a subagent) with sealed orders and no memory of the bridge. Clean context, isolated — the cold judges, the impl-producer builder, the automaton (when headless), the Scanner, the Warden.
- Inject — run a skill in the current officer’s own context. The instructions become part of who is already on the bridge — the conductor running
start-mission, the SDD-default producers it authors inline.
The conductor injects the producer governances it runs inline and projects the judges it spawns. Confusing the two — trying to inject a role that requires an independent grader, or project a producer that should stay inline with the live grill — breaks the “producer ≠ judge” independence the gate depends on.
Why keep the metaphor
Section titled “Why keep the metaphor”It earns its place three ways: it gives each prompt a posture (a Battler presses, a Warden guards, a Scanner watches), it makes altitude confusion audible (“that’s a Campaign question, not a Mission one”), and it travels — fleet command, sealed orders, and the shipyard are immediately legible to a newcomer in a way that “the outer cross-installation harness-improvement loop” is not.