Development mode

How work on this project is run: classic, steps, or use cases.

The mode decides one thing: whether a confirmed use case and an open step are required before work begins. Everything else — the technical laws of the project — holds in all four.

ClassicOrdinary work by request: you say what to change, the agent changes it. No case, no step, no queue.Take it for small, separate tasks — a fix, a wording, one page.

Development stepscurrentrecommended for Opus 5The agent breaks the task into numbered steps with sub-steps, and works the queue. What is planned survives the end of a session, because it is written down before it is executed.Take it when the work is longer than one conversation.

Use casesminimum requirement: Fable 5+recommended: dynamic workflowsrecommended: a Max planThe fullest order: the owner confirms use cases, they become products, products become a queue of steps. Nothing is built on a guess, and every step names the case it serves.Take it when a product is being built, not patched.

Save this mode and the Products group appears in the menu.

Move to Fracteraminimum requirement: Fable 5+recommended: dynamic workflowsrecommended: a Max planneeds access to your projectYour project already exists. The agent reads its code — architecture, dependencies, what rests on what — lays out what it found as a file tree, and turns that tree into a queue of numbered steps. The frame comes first: addresses, tables, sign-in. Your data moves last, on access you grant yourself.Take it when the project is already written and needs moving, not starting over.

Save this mode and the "Move to Fractera" tab appears — that is where you give the address of your repository or point at the folder on your machine.

What the mode never changes. Static public pages, size limits, translations instead of inline text, settings read from config — these hold in every mode. A law that a mode could switch off would not be a law.

How this works

Where the choice lives. In PLATFORM-CONFIG on the server, beside the feature switches. The agent reads it at the start of a session, so it survives the end of a conversation — which is why this is a setting and not a phrase said in chat.

What it costs. Use cases cost more than steps, and steps more than classic — in tokens and in your time. That is the trade-off, and it is yours to make. The model is a requirement, not a ban: the badges on the cards name the model each mode was built for, and nothing here stops you from choosing otherwise. Use cases and a migration are the heavy ones: they hold a long chain of reasoning across a whole session, and a twenty-dollar plan usually runs out of room mid-way. A Max plan is what they were built for.