# Keep a Value

> A one-page discipline you hold yourself to before you build, or before you build any more. Three questions, a six-part gate, a stranger should be able to verify the third one without asking you. Output is what you ship; value is the change your recipient would fight to keep.

Keep a Value is a discipline, not a software library. It runs in two deployments: a one-page `VALUE.md` file at the project root (the default), and a conversational walk-through of Q1/Q2/Q3 before any artifact is requested (the LLM-cadence form). Both face the same gate. A changelog records what shipped; a VALUE.md records what was supposed to change for the recipient when it did.

The discipline answers four things before the next thing gets built: Q0 (a grounding observation of the recipient hitting real friction), Q1 (who it's for - one specific named person), Q2 (what changes for them - a paired before/after), Q3 (how a stranger could verify it landed without asking you). It is then validated by a six-part gate: no hedge-words, a stranger gets it, reads aloud without footnotes, one recipient across all three sentences, the subject test (you can only promise your own behaviour), and you named what won't break.

Status: Pre-1.0. Applied to 12 real projects. The paired-run experiment (the discipline's own Q3 falsifier) is the v1.0 → v1.1 gate; recruitment is open.

## The discipline

- [The doctrine](https://www.keepavalue.com/standard): the three questions, the gate, why this discipline now (the cadence argument for LLM-era builders)
- [The runbook](https://www.keepavalue.com/runbook): walks from "I'm not sure if I'm in the build trap" to "I have a conforming VALUE.md" - or to a clean conversational pass before the next artifact ships
- [The template](https://www.keepavalue.com/template): the annotated teacher (read once, don't copy)
- [The skeleton](https://www.keepavalue.com/skeleton): copy this into your project as VALUE.md
- [Lineage](https://www.keepavalue.com/lineage): borrowed disciplines (Promise Theory, Donabedian, pre-mortem, self-explanation effect, bias blind spot, modern code review)

## Worked examples

- [Pinpoint](https://www.keepavalue.com/examples/pinpoint): incident-triage tool for the on-call engineer (software)
- [Fundraising speech](https://www.keepavalue.com/examples/fundraising-speech): 12-minute donor talk
- [Industry submission](https://www.keepavalue.com/examples/industry-submission): writing for a trade editor's slot
- [Index page](https://www.keepavalue.com/examples/index-page): the page applied to itself

## Tools

- [Stranger-test prompt](https://www.keepavalue.com/stranger-test): a prompt you paste into any LLM (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini) to get cold-read critique on your VALUE.md against the six-part gate

## License

Triple license. The doctrine (Standard.md, Runbook.md, README.md, lineage.md) is CC BY-ND 4.0 - share with attribution, do not modify. The working surface (Template.md, Skeleton.md) is CC BY 4.0 - fork, adapt, translate. The code (Makefile and tooling) is MIT.

"Keep a Value" and "Value Statement Test" are common-law trademarks of Natan Dahan. No CC license grants trademark rights.