# ADR 000012 LES MENTOR Governance GitBook **Date:** May 2026\ **Status:** Accepted\ **Decider:** NikiDigitals\ **Version:** GitBook — Thinking Layer *** ## The Question A five-year project needs a management layer. Not a heavy one — not Gantt charts and status reports — but something that provides continuity, accountability, and a regular moment of reflection. The question is what that layer looks like when the primary tool for learning and building is an AI assistant with no persistent memory between conversations. ## The Constraint That Shapes the Solution Claude, the AI mentor used throughout this project, has no memory between separate conversations. Every new chat begins with a blank slate. Without a system, every session would require significant time to re-establish context — what has been built, what decisions have been made, what comes next. Over five years, that overhead compounds into a significant waste. The solution is architectural: treat the master context document as the memory layer. It is maintained in GitHub, updated at the end of every session, and pasted at the start of every new chat. Claude reads it and has full project context in under a minute. The constraint becomes invisible. ## The Decision LES-MENTOR is established as the home base chat type. A new LES-MENTOR chat is opened once per week, named `LES-MENTOR — Week [N] — [Month Year]`. The full master context document is pasted at the opening. The session covers four things: reporting back on work completed, running a documentation check, updating the master context, and receiving the next assigned step. All technical work — building, learning, setup, documentation — happens in dedicated chat types during the week. LES-MENTOR is the review layer, not the working layer. ## Why Weekly Weekly is frequent enough to maintain momentum and catch problems early. It is infrequent enough to allow real work to accumulate between sessions. A daily check-in would produce noise. A monthly check-in would allow drift. Weekly is the cadence that mirrors how serious project management actually works. ## The Discipline It Creates The LES-MENTOR system creates a forcing function: every week, work must be commitable. Not perfect — commitable. The master context must be updated. The session journal must have an entry. Anything produced in a chat that has not been committed to GitHub by the end of the week did not happen, by the rule of the system. This is not bureaucracy. It is the minimum viable discipline for a project of this duration and complexity. A system that runs for five years without a regular review cadence does not run for five years — it drifts, loses coherence, and eventually stalls. The LES-MENTOR system is the mechanism that prevents that. --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://nikidigitals.gitbook.io/les/03-architecture/decision-log/phase-0-foundation/adr-000012-les-mentor-governance-gitbook.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.