The Decree is not a fifteenth sutra. The Decree is the operating cadence: the small, repeated, often boring things you do every week and every quarter to keep the fifteen sutras alive. A sutra you do not do is a sutra you have abandoned, no matter how often it is cited in the team wiki.
The Decree is forthcoming. The structure of the essay will be the ten steps themselves, each with: the step, the test that proves you have done it, the cadence at which you must repeat it, and the failure mode that the step is designed to prevent. The full deep-dive will follow the same editorial pattern as the sutra essays: case studies, anti-patterns, and the working vocabulary of the cadence.
The ten steps (summary)
The ten steps, in their short form, are:
- Define success. Three metrics. Three numbers. One dashboard.
- Draw boundaries. One page diagram of services & data ownership.
- Choose stores. Map each data domain to DB type and partition key.
- Instrument. Wire metrics, traces, logs, and a dashboard before the first feature ship.
- Set SLOs. Error budget & release policy.
- Automate deployment. CI / CD, canaries, feature flags.
- Practice failure. Scheduled chaos, restore drills, postmortems.
- Document. Publish runbooks and onboarding paths.
- Govern. Retrospective on cost & risk every quarter.
- Re-state the throne. Annual reassessment of the cause, the success metric, and the failure mode.
Each step has a test. Each test is binary. Each binary test produces a dashboard. Each dashboard is reviewed at the cadence that the step requires. The cadence is not optional. The cadence is the throne.