Design Graph — The Artifact

A Design Graph is the annotated call graph of a concrete problem. It is what you produce when you apply Design Thinking (see the design-method skill) to something, and it is written in Graph Protocol notation (see the graph-protocol skill).

Nodes are functions. Edges are data flow. The annotations answer, for every node: what flows through it (A), how many times it runs (cardinality), where and how it can fail (E), and what it needs to exist (R) — plus the global concerns: trust boundaries, behavior layers, resource scope, and test layers.

A Design Graph is not documentation written after the fact. It is drawn before implementation (planning), reconstructed from implementation (review), and compared against implementation (verdict). The graph is the contract; the code is one instantiation of it. Hard gate: when a turn will produce code or file edits, the graph comes first — render it (and any clarifying questions), get the user's approval, and only then write code that matches it.