Ballast
A methodology from Spotfin Creative

What keeps a fast AI build upright.

Ballast is a guardrail methodology for building IP-protected products with an AI collaborator. Ten predictable failure modes. Ten artifacts that stop them. Pulled from a real compliance-shaped build, not theorized.

Read the methodologyWork with Ballast
The failure modes

Fast AI builds fail in predictable ways.

The plan drifts while you are not looking. Decisions get remade, badly, from memory. Guardrails exist only as good intentions. Each Ballast artifact exists to stop one specific failure.

Failure mode
Artifact that stops it
Architecture gets relitigated every session
technical-plan.md
Work blobs together, nothing is reviewable
build-guide.md
“It works” replaces “it is done”
testing-and-definition-of-done.md
Guardrails exist only as intentions
ci-spec.mdhard-rules.md
The AI forgets what project it is in
CLAUDE.md
Progress and drift become invisible
BUILD-LOG.md
Decisions get remade, badly, from memory
DECISION-LOG.md
Review becomes a rubber stamp
PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md
Proprietary knowledge scatters or leaks
knowledge-map/
The UI fragments under speed pressure
design-system/
What Ballast is not
The three principles
  • Guardrails before features.
  • Decisions logged, not lost.
  • Your IP, protected by design.
Work with Ballast

Adopt it yourself, or have it applied to your build.

Ballast is free and MIT licensed. If you want it applied to your build by the person who wrote it, there are two ways to work together.

Engagement one

Foundations sprint

● Fixed price~2 weeks

Hard rules written with you, not for you. You leave able to defend your own non-negotiables.

  • —Hard rules, written with you
  • —A technical plan
  • —A knowledge-map source profile
  • —A go/no-go read on the POC
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Engagement two

POC sprint

● Fixed price, fixed scope2 to 4 weeks

A working product built the Ballast way, plus the full artifact set: repo, decision log, build log, and fail-closed CI.

  • —A working proof of concept
  • —The full artifact set
  • —Fail-closed CI

The handoff is not an afterthought. It is part of the product.

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Every pattern here caught a real problem or prevented one, on a real compliance-shaped build. Nothing is theorized.

Hard Rules Worksheet

Write your non-negotiables before you write features.

Work through the Hard Rules Worksheet, a guided version of the hard-rules exercise. Fifteen minutes, and you leave with your own card.

Start the worksheet