One folder shape for every course: a lifecycle monorepo convention

A developer created a lifecycle monorepo convention for course material, organizing each course into five numbered stages from planning to post-training. The system includes a copy-to-start template with angle-bracket slots that must be filled, and a grep command that returns nothing when the course is complete. The convention also features an archived folder for retired decisions and a CLAUDE.md file to make the structure machine-readable.

00-planning → 04-post-training . 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. <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 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. php <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-course The template is the full lifecycle skeleton with the writing already stubbed. What you must fill is marked as <angle-bracket-slots — <course-name , <promise-one-liner , and so on. Everything not in a slot is standing structure you keep. The part I like most is the definition of done. A course is ready when this returns nothing: grep -rn '<' --include=' .md' . No slot hits = no unfilled blanks. It turns "is this finished?" from a judgment call into a command with an exit code — the same instinct as a failing test. If I were wiring this into CI, that grep becomes the assertion. ARCHIVED/ : park it, don't delete it Retired formats and old campaigns go into ARCHIVED/ , in dated subfolders with a note on why it was retired and what replaced it. One rule keeps it honest: nothing live may reference anything in there. If a live file still links to it, it isn't archived — it's just moved. Why keep it at all? Because a retired price, a killed campaign style, or an abandoned format is a recorded decision . Deleting it loses the "we already tried that, here's why it didn't work." Git history technically has it, but nobody spelunks reflog for a pricing decision. CLAUDE.md : the convention, machine-readable The last piece is a CLAUDE.md at the root that spells out the layout, the naming rules, and the standing decisions. It's written for an AI coding agent, but the real value is broader: it's the one file where the convention lives as text instead of as tribal knowledge in my head. Any collaborator — human or agent — reads one file and knows where things go. The pattern generalizes past courses. Any repeatable body of work with a lifecycle — client engagements, product launches, incident write-ups — benefits from the same three moves: one fixed shape, a copy-to-start template with a grep-checkable done state, and a parking lot for retired decisions. Consistency you can grep beats consistency you have to remember.