Decision 0002 — Institutional UX doctrine, feature evaluation, and the Institutional Critic

Date: 2026-07-31 Status: accepted

Context

Four bodies of doctrine were stated by the founder: institutional user experience (confidence, progressive disclosure, no manipulation), financial stewardship (evaluate every feature economically before proposing it), the human-outcome standard by which the institution's success is measured, and a mandatory adversarial review of major proposals.

Three of the four are doctrine belonging to Codices that already own their domain. The fourth is a procedure, and a procedure that must be citable by name in every future review is better held as its own Codex than buried inside governance.

Decision

1. 1Codex 6 gains an "Institutional UX" section: confidence as the product of the interface, one primary action per view, progressive disclosure, beginners supported and experts respected in one surface, cognitive load treated as a defect metric, mastery rewarded with capability rather than points, and the acceptance test did this make the person's life better?
2. 2Codex 8 gains a feature evaluation standard: seven axes (revenue potential, implementation cost, maintenance cost, operational complexity, customer value, enterprise value, long-term strategic value) recorded with every feature proposal; ongoing operational cost without strategic value is refused rather than deferred; prefer systems that strengthen as adoption rises. It also gains the human-outcome standard: what the institution optimizes for and what it will never build.
3. 3Codex 10 — The Institutional Critic is created: nine questions answered in writing before any major proposal is accepted, with a definition of "major" and the standard that a failed question means redesign before proposal.
4. 4Codex 9 amendment procedure now requires the critique to accompany the decision record.
5. 5README.md and AGENTS.md updated to Codices 2–10 and to require the Critic.

Alternatives considered

• Fold the Critic into Codex 9. Rejected: governance is read when doctrine changes, whereas the Critic must be read before every feature. Burying it would make it ceremonial.
• Make the Critic a review board. Rejected: a board creates a queue and a bottleneck at a hundred times the scale, and diffuses responsibility. The proposer owns the critique.
• Leave the UX rules as aesthetic guidance. Rejected: the prohibitions on manipulation are constitutional (Codex 1, Article VI) and need enforceable interaction-level expression.

Consequences

• Major proposals become slower to write and faster to approve.
• Every future decision record carries evidence that scale, simplicity, duplication, security, and first-use were considered.
• Cost discipline moves from launch review to design time.

Supersedes

Nothing. Extends Codices 6, 8, and 9; adds Codex 10.