OPEN PANEL — Docs
╔═══════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗ ║ ║ ║ T H R O U G H L I N E ║ ║ ───────────────────── ║ ║ a venture as one coherent, generative organism ║ ║ ║ ╚═══════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝Stop building a venture as a pile of disconnected documents. Build it as a living stack where a single decision propagates — checked by machine — to everything it touches.
The idea, in one breath
Section titled “The idea, in one breath”A deck. A name. A cap table. A token. A legal structure. Authored at different times, by different hands, and silently drifting out of agreement until nobody can answer the only question that matters:
“If we change this — what else is now wrong?”
THROUGHLINE answers it. A venture becomes seven layers generated from raw motivation, grounded by research, and held together by a spine that behaves like slime mold: every artifact is a node, every “conforms-to” is a tube, and a decision change is a nutrient pulse from the source that must reach every dependent. What it doesn’t reach is stale — and the tooling tells you exactly which nodes starved.
That’s the eureka: a venture you can refactor like code.
The stack
Section titled “The stack” motivation ┌── the line that │ │ holds it all 0 ───────● SUBSTRATE why · values · constraints │ │ │ 1 ───────● THESIS the falsifiable bet │ │ │ 2 ───────● VISION the world if it wins │ change one │ │ layer → 3 ───────● IDENTITY who it is │ the pulse │ │ sweeps every 4 ───────● BRAND how it shows up │ layer below, │ │ mechanically. 5 ───────● ARTIFICE entity · capital · token │ │ │ 6 ───────● MECHANISM how humans actually engage │ │ │ ▼ └── critpath keeps artifice it all coherentFour research lenses — io-psych · behavioralism · economics · identity/semiotics — diagnose each layer. They never approve it. → framework/
It isn’t a template. It’s a machine.
Section titled “It isn’t a template. It’s a machine.”The coherence isn’t a vibe — it’s enforced by stdlib tooling:
| Tool | What it does |
|---|---|
🧬 critpath | reads a lineage block in every doc, builds the dependency DAG, ranks the trunk by downstream flux, finds the critical path, and runs sweep <term> to surface every stale / untracked node when a canonical decision changes. |
🪤 landgrab | scans + (gated) registers a name across domains · ENS · token tickers · GitHub · npm/PyPI/crates · socials — scan-first, register-gated, never touches a wallet key. |
🔖 wsref | the out-of-band complement to critpath: rides an invisible reference · lineage edge · integrity stamp in the document’s bytes (Unicode variation-selector encoding) so it survives copy-paste and export to chat/PDF. lint/scan keep the channel observable; encode refuses to author dangerous payloads; verify is tamper-evident. |
| 🔬 research fan-out | a 6-dimension adversarial diligence sweep (research · precedent · business · case law · economics · thought-leaders) → a ranked menu of load-bearing legal constructs. |
critpath sweep Foundationonce turned a “fix one label” task into the truth: a pivot had stranded the old meaning across 11 documents, 9 of them untracked. The machine found what the eye missed.
How a venture gets built (six moves)
Section titled “How a venture gets built (six moves)”Top-down generation, bottom-up grounding, then a coherence loop — not a waterfall. Each move maps to machinery the repo already ships.
- ELICIT — extract the SUBSTRATE as a structured brief (motivation · constraints · goal) by forced-choice interview, not a blank page.
- GENERATE — produce each layer as a lineage-annotated artifact; record every fork as a canonical decision in the org’s
CANON.md. - GROUND — run each artifact through its four lens lever-sheets (
LENSES.md); fix anything incoherent — never anything merely undesirable. - CLEAR — clear BRAND & ARTIFICE against reality (names, namespaces, entities, tickers) with
landgrab. - COHERE — after every canonical change, run
critpath sweepand resolve every REVIEW / HIDDEN-DEP / UNTRACKED node. - ITERATE — amendments feed back to the source via an explicit back-edge; the stack is a loop. (
wsrefcarries the lineage even after an artifact leaves the repo.)
The lineage block at the top of each doc — defines · conforms_to · depends_on · consumes — is what makes moves 5–6 mechanical instead of manual. → tools/critpath/LINEAGE.md
The one principle it will not break
Section titled “The one principle it will not break”Success ≠ desirability. The framework optimizes coherence + fidelity to the founder’s substrate — and refuses to privilege whether a venture is conventionally desirable (max margin, max defensibility, max scale, exit-ready).
- Arizona Iced Tea — 99¢ for 30+ years, won’t raise the price, won’t sell. Flunks every desirability heuristic; a roaring, coherent success. THROUGHLINE honors it as-is — it does not tell you to “optimize.”
- Public markets on game studios — shareholder maximization guts profitable studios for not being maximally desirable. Desirability, imposed through the capital structure, corroding success itself.
So the framework privileges longevity · stability · societal benefit · stakeholder (not shareholder) value — and treats the entity/ownership layer as a choice of how much external desirability pressure to admit.
Instances (horizontal scale)
Section titled “Instances (horizontal scale)”The core is venture-agnostic. Each org under orgs/ runs the same framework + the same tools:
| Org | What | Status |
|---|---|---|
| OPEN PANEL | free-comics publisher; owned universe; PBC + steward-trust + $LONGBOX | instance #1 — fully worked |
| RINA | wishes/offers marketplace w/ deposits | scaffolded — awaiting elicit + research fan-out |
Spin up a new venture: copy the question into ELICIT, generate down the stack, landgrab the names, critpath the coherence. Same machine, new content.
Quickstart
Section titled “Quickstart”# see the dependency trunk + critical path of any org packagecd tools/critpath && python3 -m critpath --root ../.. graph
# what breaks if a canonical term changespython3 -m critpath --root ../.. sweep PBC
# clear a name across every surfacecd ../landgrab && python3 -m landgrab scan longbox
# run the adversarial research fan-out on an org (opt-in; spawns agents)# → Workflow tool: research-fanout { org: "rina" }framework/ THROUGHLINE.md · LAYERS · LENSES · RESEARCH_FANOUT ← the universal coretools/ critpath · landgrab · wsref ← the machineorgs/ openpanel · rina · … ← the instances.claude/ workflows/research-fanout.js ← the runnable diligence sweepThe story is free. The universe is the asset. The spine keeps both honest.