# FOCUS-EXAMPLES.md — few-shot examples for the focus judgment pass

These examples pin the REGISTER and STRUCTURE the rubric demands. Every example is
FICTIONAL — a made-up person, made-up features, made-up dates. Copy the shape, never the
content. (Law: an example carrying a real person's answer makes the rubric unvalidatable —
the model must find the person-specific instance on its own.)

## Priority bullets — verdict register, merged, action-ending, ≤4 total

BAD (question, metric tuple, no action):
  "Checkout flow · 9 days. 412 msgs across 9d at a 31% steering share — was the scope
  declared upfront, or did each round define the next?"

GOOD (drag row merged with its ship-sooner, one bullet, plain speech, ends in an action):
  "Checkout flow: usable by Mar 14, then 6 more days of polish with no outside eyes.
  Most of that polish answered questions one real user would have settled in an
  afternoon — ship the day-one version to two people before the next polish pass."

GOOD (missing row, said plainly, first position):
  "Nothing in the window put the product in front of an outside person; the closest row
  tests the delivery mechanism, not actual delivery. Book one external read this week."

GOOD (exoneration — this row does NOT appear in priority; one line in findings instead):
  finding: "The search-indexer row looks low-flow only because each rebuild takes an
  hour to verify; that is waiting, not drift, so it is not a problem to fix."

## Flow-kinds and triggers — bullets, dark, each with its lever or fix

You're in flow state when:
  - building a net-new feature you can see working the same sitting
  - copy and layout work where the result is checkable by eye
  - returning from a break straight into a hot thread (protect the first minutes back;
    5 of your 7 longest runs started there)

It never ignites in:
  - long tuning loops with no ground truth to check against
  - platform admin and credential work
  - uninterpretable output you cannot tell worked (6×) — fix: the agent reports
    verdict-first: one line saying what changed, whether it worked, how verified,
    before any detail or code.

## Leverage — keep column earns credit; recommendations are plain, no "an agent should own this" slop

keep what works:
  - "Bounded refactors finished in one sitting — your reorg ran near-full flow start to
    finish; single-sitting scope is where you stay locked in."
recommendations:
  - "Schedule the nightly index rebuild and read a one-line result each morning instead
    of watching it run (~2h/wk back)."

## The four-part CLAUDE.md block — fixed structure, receipts in parentheses, under 25 lines

## Flow rules, derived from 41 days of my own session logs, 2026-03-20

My flow profile
- My longest runs start mid-morning; I rarely type before 9:30.
- My flow dies when I have to ask what the output means (6 of my 11 longest runs).
- Silent waits on slow rebuilds pull me out.

What you should do
- Own terminal and console work end to end; never hand me steps.
- State your call and proceed; at most one truly blocking question, never a menu.

In every response
- Lead with the verdict: what changed, did it work, how you verified it.
- Restate my spec in one line before a build pass.

At the end of every response
- One line: what changed and how it was verified.
- The single next decision or a reviewable chunk, never a menu.
- Any threads still running, so I re-enter without asking.

## Accountability bullets — second person, each earned by a receipt, concrete

  - "Catches your late starts, since you first touch the keyboard around 9:40 most
    days, and asks for the one thing before noon."
  - "Flags when you have tuned the same component for days without putting it in
    front of anyone new."
  - "Reminds you at night to write tomorrow's first task — your record shows a declared
    target is what starts your day."

## Tone contrasts — the line between landing and slop

SLOP: "You seem like a productive person who values deep work!"
STANDARD: "In 41 sessions you built the grader. In 0 sessions anyone else saw its
output. The gap is the finding — book the outside read."

SLOP: "Consider leveraging agentic automation to optimize your operational overhead."
STANDARD: "Schedule the admin sweep; stop letting it interrupt the 1pm block."

## Taste — what lands and what reads as cringe (complete context, learned from live feedback)

The reader is sharp, impatient, and allergic to filler. These are hard rules, not vibes:

READS AS CRINGE — never ship:
- Metric tuples in prose: "412 msgs across 9d at a 31% steering share". The charts carry
  the numbers; sentences carry meaning. One number per sentence, in parentheses, max.
- Questions fired at the reader in feedback sections ("was the scope declared upfront?").
  State the inference. The reader argues with questions and acts on verdicts.
- Praise inside a faults section. "What to do differently" holding "you did this right"
  destroys trust in the whole section. Credit lives ONLY in the keep list.
- Consultant-speak and role narration: "an agent should own this", "leverage automation",
  "optimize your workflow". Say the action itself: "schedule the sweep".
- Wordy prose blocks where bullets belong. If a reader wouldn't read it, don't write it.
- Feature names longer than 2-3 words; gerund-phrase names ("Setting up end-to-end
  testing for app distribution" → "E2E testing").
- The same workstream mentioned twice in one section — merge or cut.
- Em dashes in generated copy (reads as AI slop), literal asterisks for bold, grey text
  on key content, generic horoscope praise ("you value deep work!"), hedging, filler.
- A truth repeated. Said once, it lands; twice, it lectures.
- Unearned bullets: any line without a receipt behind it dilutes the lines that have one.
- Banal causes: "admin work keeps you out of flow" — of course it does; nobody needs a
  dashboard for that. A negative finding ships only if it is non-obvious (the 3pm thread
  drain, the nothing-queued starvation), never if the reader would say "obviously".

LANDS — ship this:
- A bold one-line verdict that frames the section instantly ("You should be in flow
  state much longer"), then the benchmark that makes it concrete.
- Short dark bullets a reader scans in ten seconds; headings OUTSIDE cards; one-word
  group headers; real visual division.
- Benefit-first framing for artifacts ("A gift...") — what it does for the reader,
  then the thing.
- Specificity that makes the reader think "it actually saw that": the exact habit, the
  exact day, the exact phrase they use. Specific enough to be slightly embarrassing.
- Contrast pairs: "41 sessions building the grader; 0 sessions where anyone saw its
  output." The gap is the finding.
- Every insight ends with an action. Insight without a next action is entertainment.