KAN › The method · lesson 1 of 7

A rung delivers one consumer value

KAN plans around value, not tasks. The unit is the rung, and the words that define it are worth reading exactly.

Teaches from kan/rung-delivery.md, “Start from value: 6W”, kan/guide/aus/00-foundations.md, kan/guide/aus/10-principles.md and kan/foundations.md.

The rule

“A rung delivers one consumer value through a selected set of one or more Agentic User Stories (AUS).” An Agentic User Story is the record of one consumer promise: its problem, its value, its boundaries and the examples that would show it is met. A rung selects one or more of them around a single value, and its record references those stories without copying their promises.

Three distinctions follow, all from the same section:

• “A rung is not a quota of tasks or a synonym for a story number.”
• “Several waves can advance the same AUS.”
• “A wave delivers a bounded part or resolves a blocking question; it does not silently accept the entire story.”

And if the value itself changes while you work, you go back: “If the value changes, return to UNDERSTAND and refine the AUS.”

Making a good one

An Agentic User Story is still a user story. The AUS guide keeps the familiar “as a … I want … so that …” construction, which “helps name the user, capability, and reason, but does not replace discussion”, and the three Cs behind it: “Ron Jeffries described the practice as Card, Conversation, Confirmation.”

Its quality check is INVEST, read as questions rather than a score: “INVEST: a quality check, not an automatic score”. The question for Small is the one a rung lives by: “Can feedback be obtained on one end-to-end case?” The guide names the split that fails it: “Splitting into parser, report, and documentation without a consumer”.

The shape that passes is a tracer bullet, the Pragmatic Programmer idea that kan/foundations.md carries: “Build a retained end-to-end slice”. A story's first rung is that slice, thin and kept. It is not a prototype to throw away, because “A research prototype answers a question; it is not necessarily the production foundation.”

Try it

In the EchoEdu delivery

The migration's epic, specs/edu/epics/edu.epic.1.md, lists one row per lane, and each row names one value. The Redis Patterns lane's value is “Redis Patterns complete for people and agents”, delivered through its story, edu.20, in wave W1. The waves themselves came from the Operator's decision, KAN CRS0RWpJUXlqGu: W1 the generator, platform, release and Redis Patterns; W2 the other three repository courses; W3 the recovered Elixir course.

The rule about waves showed up when the pivot to an interactive application arrived. The Integration seat kept landing the W1 platform heads, but said plainly what that meant: “I keep gating and landing them, but as an enabling capability. My DONE won't call them EDU or course acceptance” (KAN CRS0RWvQYBEDBY). The heads were delivered; the stories they served were not accepted by that landing.

Check yourself

1. A wave lands every page of a course but not its companions. Is the course's story accepted?
2. Why does a rung record reference its stories instead of copying their promises?
3. Midway through a wave, the consumer asks for something else. Which phase do you return to?

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Teaches ecd/kan at 2d1b5c8e, 25 October 2026.