Artifact Types

HELIX defines a catalog of artifact types — categories of governing document, each with a template, an authoring prompt, metadata, and quality criteria. Every project applying HELIX produces concrete artifacts that instantiate these types. Artifact types are reusable HELIX document patterns; they are not tied to DDx or any other runtime.

There are two related public landing paths:

/artifact-types/ is the artifact-type catalog: HELIX document shapes, prompts, and quality rules.
/artifacts/ publishes examples from HELIX’s own project documents, authored from the catalog under docs/helix/.

The HELIX skill uses this catalog and the artifact authority hierarchy to find drift between concrete artifacts and propose a plan for restoring alignment.

Browse by activity. Each activity lists the core artifacts first, then the supporting artifacts teams use when they need more detail, risk control, or operational depth.

Discover

Validate that an opportunity is worth pursuing before committing to a development cycle.

Frame

Define what the system should do, for whom, and how success will be measured.

Design

Decide how to build it. Capture trade-offs, contracts, and architecture decisions.

Test

Define how we know it works. Plans, suites, and procedures that bind specs to implementation.

Build

Implement against the specs and tests. Capture the implementation plan that scopes the work.

Deploy

Ship to users with appropriate operational support, monitoring, and rollback plans.

Iterate

Measure, align, and improve. Close the feedback loop back into the planning strand.

Innsigle seal: model-primary by HELIX

The signature covers the markdown source of this page, not these HTML bytes. This page quotes that seal; verify it against the source file.

Composition: model-primary
Issuer: HELIX helix
Signing key: ed25519:b0865d76d834a52c48506414d16f4e5a (build key)
Signed source: artifact-types/_index.md
Signed: 2026-09-23T14:11:58Z
Content digest: sha256:21cc2ec5…5e6d78fd

This build key is endorsed by the human key for build signing; the signature is not a detector and not a truth guarantee.

Raw attestation JSON

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attestation file · issuer keys