Cujgel

Context for LLMs

Cujgel is a design system, designated GSV-X8 (pace-layer X, infrastructure-tooling domain) in the General Systems Ventures registry, whose unit of design is not a UI component but the Critical User Journey (CUJ): a concrete account of what a person is trying to do, the steps they take, and the mental model they bring to it. Its premise is that a coding agent handed a tidy feature list will still build the wrong thing, because the list omits metis, the messy, practical, hard-to-codify knowledge of how work actually gets done; Cujgel's job is to gel that metis into a spec precise enough for an agent to build from without flattening it into something clean but wrong. Two ideas anchor the method: from McLuhan, a tool reshapes its user, so a CUJ session starts from the apps a person already admires and inhabits rather than an abstract open question; from James C. Scott, legibility destroys metis, so the resulting schema is deliberately evidence-first, derived from Cujgel's own captured journeys rather than designed top-down. The pipeline runs in a fixed sequence: discover which reference apps the user loves, teardown those apps for their adopted UX patterns, provoke the user with sharp either/or alternatives drawn from the teardown rather than validating assumptions, capture the session as cited evidence in the user's own words, and derive that evidence into a CUJ spec plus candidate features. The schema itself is built to enforce this thesis, including a mental_model field that captures the user's own framing rather than an idealized one. No strategy grounding or portfolio-connection material is available for this project beyond the public description, so its relationships to other GSV projects are not established here. Status: the material provided describes a defined method and pipeline structure without stating a shipped/in-flight status, so status should be read as design-documented rather than confirmed as built.