The Slice Discipline Field Guide

In September I wrote Own the Slice. It argued that AI made writing code cheap and left finishing work expensive, and that the fix is a slice: one outcome a person can use, with one owner and a done test that proves it in the real world.

Then Harshal Dhir took the essay to an enterprise deadline. He kept his agents at full speed, changed the unit they worked on, and turned the idea into an open-source agent skill, slice-discipline. "A slice gave me a smaller thing to hold on to," he wrote. His words open the book.

Fourteen chapters in three parts

• The Unit. Two clocks, the slice, and the done test. About twenty minutes, and the part to read first.
• The Discipline. Plan in slices, delegate with a verify line, ship one slice per turn, keep the plan as the memory, and execute from a brief. It ends with a case study: Jane, an open-source app I build with my son Landon, run in slices anyone can read.
• The Builder. Slices beyond code, work that won't slice, and slices inside loops, then a plan for Monday.

The online edition is interactive. It has a two-clocks calculator, drills, a quiz, and a plan linter that checks your plan the way the agent skill does. What you type stays in your browser, and at the end you can download all of it as one file.

Builders who use AI

I wrote it for the person I described in The Philosopher Builder: someone who can think and ship across design, product, and engineering, with AI as the main tool. Often that is a business owner who became the builder because nobody else was going to. What that person usually lacks is someone down the hall asking whether the work is actually done. The book gives you that question in a form you and your agents can run.

Every rule in it also exists as an agent skill, so your agents can follow the same discipline you do. Harshal's slice-discipline came first, and my working-in-slices builds on it. The Kit, at the back of the book, says what each one adds.