One folder shape for every course: a lifecycle monorepo convention

TL;DR I merged several training courses into one monorepo and gave every course the same numbered folder shape : 00-planning → 04-post-training . A _TEMPLATE/ you copy to start the next one, an _ARCHIVED/ you park old stuff in, and a CLAUDE.md that makes the convention machine-readable. The trick that makes it stick: templates use <angle-bracket-slots> , and "done" is a grep that returns nothing. I had course material scattered across repos — planning notes here, marketing copy there, facilitator run-sheets in a third place. Every new course started from a blank page, and I re-invented the folder layout each time. So I collapsed everything into one monorepo with a single rule: every course has the identical shape. The lifecycle, as folders The insight isn't "use folders" — it's that a course has a lifecycle , and numbered folders make that lifecycle the primary axis instead of file type. Plan it, sell it, teach it, run it, follow up. Five stages, always in order: Folder Stage What lives here 00-planning/ Prepare Syllabus (source of truth), specs 01-marketing/ Sell Positioning master + channel assets 02-content/ Teach Modules, one file each 03-delivery/ Run Run-sheet, pre-flight checklist, fallback plan 04-post-training/ Follow up Feedback form, follow-up email, post-mortem The numeric prefix isn't decoration. It forces sort order to match the actual workflow, so the folder listing reads like the process itself. Same reason migration files are timestamped — order is information. <course>/ 00-planning/ -> derives everything below 01-marketing/ 02-content/ 03-delivery/ 04-post-training/ --. post-mortem findings | ^------------------' feed back into 00..03 That loop at the end matters: the post-mortem doesn't sit in a graveyard folder. Its findings flow back into the syllabus, the run-sheet, the marketing. The structure runs the same feedback loop it's supposed to teach. _TEMPLATE/ : a course starts as a copy Starting a new course is one line: cp -r _TEMPLATE my-new-cou