Padhanam (Malayalam for "studying") is a public demonstration that a senior product leader can direct the end-to-end implementation of an enterprise-grade agentic platform through Claude Code without writing code. The platform is built to enterprise standards: multi-tenant, identity-federated, audit-chained, jurisdiction-aware, OTel-instrumented. The architectural discipline is the test of whether AI-assisted development can sustain production-shaped software when directed by a product leader rather than implemented by engineers. The methodology that emerges from running the experiment is the proprietary insight; the platform is the artefact that proves it.
Padhanam is Apache 2.0 licensed. The platform is the demonstration; the methodology is the proprietary insight. See LICENSE for the full text.
The charter under charter/ holds design intent. Read in this order:
- bet.md — strategic intent, the proposition being investigated, and what success looks like
- methodology.md — how the product-leader-and-implementer pattern is being run (pending operator authorship per D39; the gap is recorded in
current-package.md) - principles.md — engineering rules, read every session
- decisions.md — append-only architectural decisions log
- roadmap.md — living strategic-tree artefact (bet, phases, packages, sessions) with versioned reasoning per D44; packages.md is the static reference
- phase-1-prd.md — living phase PRD with delta capture at audit per D43
- prfaq.md — living external-voice storytelling artefact, refreshed at every phase audit per D45
- current-package.md — active scope and carryover items
History lives separately under log/ (sessions, packages, audits, captures) and old material is moved to docs/archive/ at audit boundaries — never deleted.
Strategic work — bets, audits, package planning, decisions assessed under Kano — produces charter edits, session prompts, and roadmap version updates. Build and test work — implementation, schema migrations, tests, commits — produces code commits and session-log entries. Both modes happen through Claude Code; mode separation is maintained by the operator declaring mode at conversation start, by distinct deliverables, and by distinct commit conventions (docs(charter): ... or docs(pN/<boundary-name>): ... for strategic; feat(pN/sN): ... and docs(pN/sN): ... for build), per D47. The charter files bridge the two modes: decisions made in strategic mode land in decisions.md and become constraints in build mode; audit findings flow back through the same files. The methodology by which strategy and build are bridged is itself the artefact under investigation, to be documented in charter/methodology.md.
Start with charter/bet.md, then charter/principles.md. CLAUDE.md describes how Claude Code is expected to operate inside the repo.
mkcert is a host dependency: install with brew install mkcert nss and run mkcert -install once to add the local CA to the system trust store. Generate localhost.pem and localhost-key.pem into ./certs/ with mkcert -cert-file certs/localhost.pem -key-file certs/localhost-key.pem localhost langfuse.localhost; the directory is gitignored because the certs are host-machine-specific. The cert covers both names because UI services live on subdomains (Langfuse on langfuse.localhost); add new SANs as further UI services land. make up starts the Caddy proxy alongside the rest of the stack. Verify with curl https://localhost/health (returns ok) and curl https://langfuse.localhost/api/public/health (returns Langfuse JSON), both with valid TLS handshakes (no -k needed). *.localhost resolves to 127.0.0.1 on macOS without /etc/hosts changes.