Eidos — a system of organization for defining a product

Product knowledge rots. It scatters into tickets that close, wikis nobody prunes, and the heads of people who leave. Six months on, the only honest answer to “what is this thing supposed to be?” is a meeting.

Eidos is our answer to that. It is a system of organization for defining a product: one markdown file is the complete source of truth for one unit of what you are building, accurate before the thing exists, while it is built, and after it is retired. The files sit next to the code they describe, are reviewed in pull requests, and are read by people and coding agents alike.

Two words carry the whole idea

• Framework. The form: the collections, templates, variants, properties, and roles that govern how you write. It lives in .eidos/ at the root and is the portable piece, the part one team hands to another.
• Blueprint. One unit, defined completely. A single markdown file, frontmatter plus a body, that is the whole source of truth for one piece of the product.

The standard never names what any of those are called. Three seed frameworks (software, book, research) get you started, and a framework that ends up looking like none of them is working as intended.

What we ship

• The eidos CLI, published to npm as eidosmd. It scaffolds a root, generates blueprints that are born conforming, validates them against the root’s own framework, regenerates the indexes, and prints the workflow an agent needs to work in one. Plain files, no service, no hidden state.
• A local browser. eidos browser opens the root on your own machine: canvas maps for designing the product visually, each collection as a table, a reader, typed property editing, and search across every blueprint. Every write in the page runs the same command you would run in the terminal.
• The Registry at eidosmd.com, where published frameworks live and can be installed by name.
• The documentation at eidosmd.com, including the standard itself, the quick start, and the guides that turn any coding agent into a facilitator rather than an author.

Built for people first

Eidos is human-first. The owner holds the intent, the scope, and the decisions; an agent facilitates. The CLI owns structure so an agent never hand-assembles frontmatter or edits a generated index, and the words in a blueprint are written with the owner, not for them.

npm install -g eidosmd
eidos install @BuildableWorks/software --product "Your Product"

The standard is maintained by Buildable and is Apache-2.0. The tooling is ours: free for personal and noncommercial use, with a commercial license for use at work. We use it to define our own products, including everything else on this page.