Draft, September 2026

Home / Follow the story / Act 5, scene 19: Drill-down: onboarding

Act 5, scene 19: Drill-down: onboarding

The explainer video for the paper SaaS architecture when code is cheap
Transcript

Scene 19: onboarding

The brownfield journey starts where the customer's did, with onboarding. Every step of onboarding draws on the same domain invariants, which the language can represent once and share across the whole journey. Requirements would be stated in the domain's vocabulary, and the agent would write them as a document. The validator would check the configuration against the domain's rules before anything is applied. Customisation and training would draw on the same definitions, so each step works from one description of the domain rather than its own. The same onboarding document drives the data migration, and each failure cites the record and the rule that rejected it. The product itself is untouched, because the document compiles to inputs the product already accepts. For the provider, the knowledge a few specialists held is written into the grammar, and review moves from every attribute toward judging outputs. So far, only the migration step of onboarding has been demonstrated, on test data.

Go deeper