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Context before code

Three tools capture what people know and want, and turn it into context that a builder, human or agent, can work from: Alis Ideate Projects keep everything a piece of work touches, Alis Ideate Interviews ask the people who know, and Alis Ideate Artifacts turn the context into documents others can act on. Most of the work happens through Alis, the agent you chat with in the console: Alis reads a project, answers from it, and runs interviews, research and artifacts when you ask. This page explains what each tool is for, how a conversation becomes a specification, how the Alis Build tools read the result, and what the design gives up to get there. It is for anyone deciding how to use these tools, or wondering why they look the way they do.

The problem

Most of what matters about a piece of work never gets written down. It is said in meetings, explained on a call, or sits in one person's head as "how we actually do it". Requirements documents are written after the fact, by one person, from memory, and they flatten disagreement into one tidy story. The builder then rediscovers the missing detail the hard way.

The bet is to keep the source. Record the conversation, upload the deck, let an AI interviewer ask the people who know, and store all of it as it was said. Then let the machine do the reading and write the structured documents from the evidence.

Alis Ideate Projects: keep the source

flowchart TB
  subgraph Sources
    N[Notes]
    R[Recordings and memos]
    F[Documents and files]
    I[Interviews]
    W[Internet research]
    N ~~~ I
    R ~~~ W
  end
  subgraph Context
    T[Transcripts and extracted text]
    S[Insights per contribution]
  end
  subgraph Outputs
    M["Synthesis<br/><small>overview, pain points, process,<br/>stakeholders, technology,<br/>jargon, gap analysis</small>"]
    Q["Artifacts<br/><small>documents, pages, PDFs and images,<br/>from scratch or from a skill</small>"]
  end
  N & R & F & I & W --> T --> S --> M --> Q

A project is the container. Everything added to it is a contribution: a note, a voice memo, a screen recording, a batch of files, a meeting transcript, an interview, a research task. The project reads each one when it arrives: recordings are transcribed, documents and spreadsheets have their text and structure pulled out, and a model draws insights from each. The original stays downloadable, so nothing is lost in the reading.

From the whole set, the project keeps its Synthesis current without being asked: one document with the overview, pain points, current process, stakeholders, technology, jargon and a gap analysis. When a new contribution lands, the sections it should change show Out of date until they are updated, so a reader can always tell whether a document reflects everything the project holds.

Alis Ideate Interviews: ask the people who know

The hardest context to capture is in other people's heads, and they will not write it down. The answer is the AI interview. You describe what you want to find out and from whom; Alis drafts a plan and a participant-facing brief; you send a link. Each participant has a private conversation with Alis, typed or spoken, whenever suits them, in their own language. What they say lands on the project as their contribution, and a report is written across everyone.

Two choices matter here. The interviewer works only from the plan, so the plan has to say what you believe and what would change your mind. And the interview is one to one and asynchronous: people say things to an interviewer that they would soften in a meeting, and the report can show where they disagree instead of averaging them.

Alis Ideate Artifacts: documents others can act on

Anyone can ask Alis for an artifact: a document, page, PDF or image written from a project's context, from scratch or starting from a skill. An artifact is how the context leaves the project for people who will never open it: a business case for whoever holds the budget, a prototype for the people who will use the thing. Artifacts keep versions you can restore, can be shared by link, and show Out of date in the same way as Synthesis, so a reader can tell whether one still reflects what the project holds.

Gaps are first-class

The Alis Ideate tools treat what is not known as data. The gap analysis, the alignment opportunities from research, and every interview report label the unknowns with the same five tags: a conflict between people or contributions, a missing voice that should have weighed in, an open question raised but never answered, an unvalidated assumption treated as settled, and something underspecified, acknowledged but too vague to act on. Each tag implies a follow-up, and most of those follow-ups are another contribution or another interview. The map a coding agent gets from the CLI also says who has access but has contributed nothing, because an owner who has put nothing in is a perspective nobody has heard.

How the Alis Build tools read it

The Alis Build tools are where a service gets defined, built and deployed. Nothing is pushed into them. Instead, the project is readable from the same command line that drives Alis Build DBD, so whoever builds, a person or a coding agent, starts from what was actually said:

%%{init: {"sequence": {"wrap": true}}}%%
sequenceDiagram
  participant P as People
  participant I as Project
  participant A as Coding agent
  participant B as Alis Build DBD
  P->>I: contributions, interviews
  I->>I: transcribe, extract, synthesise
  A->>I: alis ideate context
  A->>I: alis ideate artifacts read / contribution
  A->>B: alis define, build, deploy
  A->>I: alis ideate add note (what was learnt)

alis ideate context prints one compact map of a project; the agent opens only the parts that matter, checks whether the context is still settling or any artifact is out of date, reads the gap analysis, and relays blocking gaps to the humans instead of inventing answers. An AlisX Specialist can gather missing context for a support ticket by starting an interview from it. The handover is a read, not a transfer, so the project stays the single source of what people said, and anything the build teaches can be added back as a note.

Trade-offs

Reading costs time. A one-hour recording has to be transcribed and analysed before it counts. The project makes the wait visible, on the tile and in the map, rather than pretending the context is complete.

Everything on a project is shared with everyone on it. There are no private contributions. That is what makes the project a trustworthy single source, and it is why interview participants are invited to one interview rather than to the project.

Outputs are generated, not authored. A generated document is only as good as the contributions behind it, and it shows Out of date the moment new material arrives that should change it.

Interviews depend on the plan. An interviewer that only knows the plan cannot rescue a vague one, so the effort goes into drafting and reviewing the plan before a link exists.

The Alis Ideate tools do not build. The useful unit to hand a builder is the whole evidence trail with its gaps, not a summary that hides them. The builder, and the agents that drive Alis Build DBD, read the project instead.