How-To Guides
Michi has a reference manual — what each skill does, the patterns, the verification strategy. These how-to guides are the other half: not what the pieces are but how to use them for the work in front of you.
You don’t need to read them all. You arrive at a Michi session in a situation — a new project to set up, a multi-week effort, a bug to chase. Start from your situation; this page routes you to the guide for it.
Start here: bootstrap once
Section titled “Start here: bootstrap once”Before anything else, a project needs the Michi doc structure in place. That’s a one-time setup — see Bootstrap Michi. Bootstrapping is not part of the working rhythm; it’s what you do once so the rhythm has somewhere to run.
The backbone: the iteration cycle
Section titled “The backbone: the iteration cycle”Every other guide runs on the same backbone — the iteration cycle:
Explore → Brainstorm → Plan → Execute → Verify → Document
It’s fractal: an epic runs the cycle, each milestone inside it runs the cycle, a single bug fix runs the cycle. The five non-bootstrap guides each show how that cycle plays out for their kind of work — what each phase looks like, how heavy it is, which skill carries it. Learn the cycle once; every guide is a variation on it.
Find your guide
Section titled “Find your guide”| If you’re… | Read |
|---|---|
| Setting a project up to use Michi | Bootstrap Michi |
| Investigating, evaluating options, or thinking something through | Research and Explore |
| Shipping one bounded change — a feature, a flag, an enhancement | Implement a Task or Story |
| Taking on a multi-phase, multi-milestone effort | Run an Epic or Project |
| Diagnosing and fixing something broken | Troubleshoot and Fix a “Thing” |
| Trying to get better at working with agents | Improve Your Agent Practice |
Not sure if your work is a task or an epic? If it fits one focused pass, it’s a task. If it needs planning and lands in stages, it’s an epic. Implement a Task or Story covers when to escalate from one to the other.
A note on audience
Section titled “A note on audience”Most of these guides assume you’re writing software, but Michi isn’t only for code. Research and Explore is the most useful guide for non-developer knowledge work — research, evaluation, thinking a hard problem through — and Run an Epic or Project covers non-code epics (a research effort, a roadmap, a documentation push) explicitly. The cycle is the same; only what you verify against changes.
Also here
Section titled “Also here”- Cheatsheet — the cycle, the use cases, and the skills on one page.
- FAQ — common questions about using Michi day to day.