Vertical Slicing
How we build the first increment and grow the system in thin end-to-end slices
A semantic contract: vocabulary your project supplies itself — ready to drop into your CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md.
Build the first increment as a walking skeleton: a deployable end-to-end slice that wires every architectural layer together and does almost nothing else.
Grow the system as thin vertical slices — each slice cuts through all layers and delivers one small piece of user value. Slices are tracer bullets: kept and refined, never thrown away.
When a technical unknown blocks a slice, run a spike solution first — a timeboxed, throwaway experiment that removes the risk. Spike code is discarded; only its lesson carries into the slice.