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 methodology content; they are not tied to DDx or any other runtime.
There are two related public landing paths:
- /artifact-types/ is the reusable catalog: document shapes, prompts, and quality rules.
- /artifacts/ is the worked example: HELIX’s own governing artifacts, authored from the catalog under
docs/helix/.
The HELIX skill uses this catalog and the authority order 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.
Validate that an opportunity is worth pursuing before committing to a development cycle.
Define what the system should do, for whom, and how success will be measured.
Decide how to build it. Capture trade-offs, contracts, and architecture decisions.
Define how we know it works. Plans, suites, and procedures that bind specs to implementation.
Implement against the specs and tests. Capture the implementation plan that scopes the work.
Ship to users with appropriate operational support, monitoring, and rollback plans.
Measure, align, and improve. Close the feedback loop back into the planning strand.