A declarative language, not a prescribed process

FPF and its DPFs are declarative pattern languages. Start from the current working situation and the question that is current now. Inspect the pattern whose declared Situation and Question match that difficulty. Use its distinctions, constraints, checks, result, and stop or reopen conditions to produce the smallest useful result—or an honest blocker.

Pattern numbers, file order, table-of-contents order, and the order in which examples are presented do not prescribe a project sequence. Several kinds of engineering Work may overlap. A real dependency still matters when one result cannot be used before another exists, but that dependency belongs to the concrete results and Work under consideration, not to a universal process imposed by the pattern language.

A constituent action can also perform several levels of work at once: updating a running total can be part of calculating a result and preparing a report. The encompassing purpose changes what that action must preserve. FPF helps recover these connections and compare a replacement in its encompassing uses; the Suite References give domain examples. Using a DPF still requires the relevant capabilities, coordination and resources throughout the needed vertical, including any intermediate contribution that must be learned or obtained.

An AI agent can therefore help choose the next justified move without pretending that the entire project follows one fixed sequence. The useful move may be a clarified question, an identified System, an architecture comparison, an evidence request, a decision record, a changed Method, a bounded Work plan, a source-grounded explanation, or an explicit stop because a necessary basis is missing.