Intelligence preparation produces a mass of judged questions and answers. ASSAY's premise: those answers can become objective, quantifiable, typed objects — and be exploited by planning machinery honestly, without laundering judgement into false precision.
What ASSAY is
ASSAY explores optimisation techniques for command-and-control planning, anchored in the JIPOE/IPOE doctrine family (JP 2-01.3, ATP 2-01.3, AIntP-17). It is a deliberate re-derivation of a sibling project's principles against a new problem domain: intelligence-fed course-of-action analysis. Where a principle survives, it is validated as general; where it does not, that is a finding.
See it now
An early interactive surface now runs the real pipeline in your browser (SPEC-16), alongside the static surfaces rendered over real Meridian fixtures. All of these are live, running on the same code the build uses.
Four role tabs over one in-browser pipeline. Resolve a live contest and watch the real compile → score → relax recompute, with a "glow" that draws propagation honesty (G6) across the roles it touches. Edit an assessed band and see it refuse if dishonest.
The demonstrator's actual components — band pills, provenance chips, and the minimal S1 knowledge table with its four discipline moments — over content-addressed fixtures (SPEC-05 / SPEC-14). Not mockups: the shipped code.
The four role surfaces on Meridian data at the D+2 tableau moment: K9 supersedes K5, K12 contested. Frozen vignette identifiers only — a rendered value the vignette does not define is treated as a defect.
A stakeholder explainer of how information flows — objects, typed connectors, and gates — with a guided tour and a bounded sandbox driving the real seam (compile, score, relax). One canvas, three zoom layers; auto-recompute is stamped and attributed, never silent. Behaviours land under a flagged register candidate (ratify-after).
The same spec drawn as one apparatus — knowledge piped in, transformed through labelled stations, gates as inline decision valves, every band on a gauge. A wizard steps the six-beat walkthrough: press Next and watch data flow, the gate fire, the stamp flip. An engineering-flowchart alternative to the swimlane form above.
Fiction, deliberately. Every surface renders the Meridian Archipelago — an engineered scenario (ASSAY-DEC-8). No service, no plan, and no real operational picture sits behind these surfaces.
The objectives
ASSAY builds one spine and one small set of role surfaces, then explores a catalogue of theses across them rather than building each separately. A thesis is only ever explored — never claimed proven.
Where it is · plans becoming achievements
The build runs in seven stages — lap first, depth after — behind a spine-complete gate. This tracker records only what the repository actually contains; a stage cannot show "building" before its research note is published.
Reading
Each stage gate publishes a research note and a dated update; where a milestone warrants it, that update grows into an article that walks through what the slice actually does — with a working embed of the new component or algorithm, never a screenshot (comms plan §6).
The research-first record: each build stage opens with a bounded research note citing primary doctrine, ending in "what we will do differently." Notes 00–05 (foundations through relaxation, plus the interactive-surfaces note) are published.
The dated updates feed and its milestone articles — each carrying a live, playable embed of the slice it reports. The first article walks through the band pill with a working copy of the shipped component; more land as the stage gates do.
The stance
ASSAY's discipline is visible in its interface and in this page. The same rule governs both: no assessed quantity is rendered as fact, and no planned capability is rendered as shipped.
No scalar from an assessed source ever reaches a surface unbanded. Bands are pure closed intervals — no stored midpoint, no distributional claim. Only directly-observed values and commander's thresholds may be scalar.
Every decision is recorded in the register before it is cited anywhere else. Peer documents — and this page — are projections of it, kept current by batch propagation, never rival sources of truth.
Any verdict, score, or ranking opens a backward walk that terminates in named knowledge objects with named owners. A chain that dead-ends is a bug surfaced, not hidden.
Go deeper
ASSAY is docs-first: the reasoning is the asset. Start with the vignette and the walkthrough; the register holds every decision.