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Decision Framework

Hook

Somewhere between "we should build a graph" and actually opening a schema file sits one honest gate, and this course already built it once, with a worked example and a diagram, on Step 14. This page doesn't rebuild that gate a second time. A second, independently-written copy of the same checklist is a liability, not a convenience — it's one more place for the real thing to drift out of sync, the moment Step 14 gets revised and this page doesn't. So this page stays short on purpose: enough context to know why Step 14 is worth opening and reading directly, not a rewrite of what it says.

What Step 14 actually is

Think of it as the reference-card version of a much longer instinct: before committing to a schema, an extraction pipeline, and everything downstream of them, run the candidate past a fixed, ordered set of checks rather than trusting enthusiasm for the idea.

Step 14, closing out Part 6 (One Graph, End to End), walks a live scenario through that ordered set — six questions in fixed order, any one of which is enough to end the check for that candidate on the spot. It isn't a scorecard tallied up to a majority vote, and the six questions themselves aren't reproduced here — go read Step 14 for what they actually are.

When to reach for this page versus the full step

  • This page: a planning doc, a PR description, a conversation with a teammate who just wants the shape of the check, not the full worked example.
  • Step 14 itself: a live scenario run through all six questions, the diagram, the tool-specific prompts, and the failure mode that shows up when a team skips the check or overrides it on enthusiasm.

Step 14 is the source of truth. This page only points at it.

  • The build-a-graph method — stage A opens with this same gate, as the first move in the six-part sequence.
  • Pattern picker — for choosing among ready-to-run patterns once a candidate has actually cleared this gate.