project-blueprintlisted

# Project Blueprint Anything retrofitted costs five to fifty times what it costs to build in. The order below is not stylistic — it is ordered by the cost of getting it wrong later. **Never start typing code from a one-line brief.** Ten minutes of Phase 1 saves weeks. But do not interrogate either: ask the questions whose answers change the architecture, assume sensible defaults for the rest, and state the assumptions. --- ## Phase 1 — Understand what is actually being built Five questions. Ask only the ones you cannot infer from the brief. 1. **Who uses it, and how many?** Ten internal users and ten million consumers are different systems. If unknown, design for 10k and note the first bottleneck. 2. **What is the core transaction?** The one thing that must never be wrong. Everything else is supporting cast. 3. **What data does it hold?** Specifically: does it hold **personal data**, **payment data**, or **health/financial records**? Each adds non-optional obligations. 4. **What must it integrate with?** Existing systems, auth providers, payment rails, data sources. 5. **What are the constraints?** Team size and skills, budget, deadline, regulatory jurisdiction, self-host vs cloud. Then write, in five lines: what it is, who it serves, the core transaction, the data classification, and the constraint that dominates. Confirm this before building. Getting the brief wrong is the only unrecoverable error here. ## Phase 2 — Choose the stack, and justify