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-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 takeaway

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.