Studios deep dive

Studios is Sonderr’s goal-to-deliverable machine: you describe an outcome — a website, an app, a document, a poster — and the workspace organizes itself around producing it, with milestones, a crew of specialists and a definition of done. Release-candidate since v1.6, it’s the surface where the workflow release (v1.7) will land first. This page is the deep dive: the seven studios, the crew, the playbooks, and how to brief it well.

1 · The seven studios

• Website Studio — real sites: structure, responsive layout, accessibility, the whole stack.
• App Studio — working applications with state, flows and interfaces.
• Project Studio — the generalist: repos, scripts, multi-step engineering work.
• Developer Studio — code research, contribution guides, focused dev tasks.
• Bounty Studio — scoped external work with a scope analysis and safety review up front.
• Document Studio — print-ready PDFs and documents, built like documents, not like web pages.
• Design Studio — posters, brand systems and design kits with palette discipline and export completeness.

Each studio carries track-specific milestones and canvas hints — a website track thinks in sections and breakpoints; a document track thinks in pages, margins and print. The studio you pick shapes the plan the workspace builds.

2 · The crew — two specialists, every turn

Every real Studios work turn fields exactly two track-matched specialists: Site Architect + Interface Designer for websites; App Engineer + Experience Designer for apps; Document Architect + Page Designer for documents; Design Lead + Craft Specialist for design; Project Planner + Build Specialist for projects; Code Researcher + Contribution Guide for developer work; Scope Analyst + Safety Reviewer for bounties. The crew is phase-aware — plan, build, review and advise turns hand each worker a different, specific task — and the lead synthesizes both reports into the working state.

The division of hands is strict: specialists advise and assess; the lead, never a worker, performs all edits and checks. That single rule keeps a room of opinions from becoming a workspace with eight cooks and no accountability.

3 · Playbooks with a definition of done

Each craft carries per-craft playbooks with a definition of done — five professional rules per track, applied while working and re-run as the final acceptance check. Documents must come out print-ready. Websites get mobile-first layouts and accessibility checks as a condition of completion, not a nice-to-have. Design work holds palette discipline and complete exports. The definition of done is the difference between “the agent stopped talking” and “the work meets the bar” — and it’s enforced, not suggested.

4 · The board

Studios work lives on a board: the goal, the milestone slices, current phase, and the deliverables as they land. Mutations to the board respect the same task-mode gates as everything else — Ask-mode views are read-only, plan turns can shape milestones without touching files, and build turns carry the crew. Checkpoints tie into the board, so a Studios project survives restarts: goal, milestone, evidence, one exact next action — the same resume spine as every long task in Sonderr, wrapped around a deliverable.

5 · Briefs that work

Studios rewards specificity the way any good teammate does. The strong pattern: outcome, audience, constraints, references. “A one-page site for a local bike repair shop, mobile-first, booking form, their green #2e7d32, reference: their old flyer” produces a sharper plan than “make a website.” Constraints you state up front become acceptance checks; constraints you leave out become the crew’s defaults — reasonable, but yours to override.

And when a brief is underspecified, the Scope Analyst says so instead of guessing: the bounty track in particular opens with scope analysis and a safety review before anyone touches the work. A studio that can’t tell you what it’s building shouldn’t be building.