Frames

A frame is a blueprint describing the whole thing rather than one unit of it. Frames set what every other blueprint is judged against, and live in the framing collection.

Every framework declares a framing collection, and declares it first.

Why it’s required

This is the only structural thing Eidos insists on beyond the five core properties:

Every framework declares a framing collection. Its name, its flavors, and how many it carries are the framework’s own — a framework needs framing, not a particular set of frames.

The reasoning is that blueprints are meaningless without something to judge them against. “Should this spec exist?” is unanswerable unless something already says who the product serves and what it’s trying to achieve. Without frames, a root becomes a pile of individually-reasonable blueprints with no shared direction — which is the failure mode Eidos exists to prevent.

Required as a declaration, never as a gate

A framework that declares no framing collection is incomplete, and a check says so. But a declared frame left unwritten is a gap to surface, not a failure. Fill what’s known; leave the rest.

What the seeds frame

The three seeds show the same requirement answered three different ways:

Seed	Its frames
software	architecture · audience · criteria · market
book	premise · reader · voice · market
research	question · prior work · method · ethics

Notice these aren’t the same four ideas renamed. A research programme needs ethics framed; a book doesn’t. A book needs voice framed; software doesn’t. Your framework should frame whatever your work is actually judged against, and if that’s three things or six, that’s the right number.

What a frame looks like

Each kind of frame gets its own flavor file, frame.<kind>.md. From the software seed:

_eidos/shapes/frame.architecture.md

# {{title}}

## Shape

## Components

## Data and flow

## Boundaries and dependencies

Loose prose under stable headings. A frame records what is true now, and is revised whenever that judgment changes. Nobody should feel they need to predict the future to write one.

Frames are blueprints, not top-level docs

This trips people up, so it’s worth being blunt about.

	Frame	Top-level doc
Where	In the framing collection	At the root
Shape	Follows one	Has none
Frontmatter	Full contract	Free-form
Validated	Yes	No
Listed in Framework.md under	## Collections	## Top-Level
Repeated?	Yes, one per kind	No, one of a kind

Both are loose prose, revised in place. The difference is repetition: a shape earns its keep by being stamped again, and a document written once doesn’t need a cookie-cutter.

Tip

Frames sit flat in their collection — one file per kind, no sub-folders. They’re few, and they’re all peers.

Fill them first

The single most common way to get Eidos wrong is to skip the frames and go straight to writing blueprints, because blueprints feel like progress and frames feel like preamble.

Fill the frames first. It takes an afternoon, most of it argument, and the argument is the value — you find out that two people have been building toward different audiences before either of them writes a spec that assumes one.

Then, when you write a blueprint, you have something concrete to check it against: does this serve the audience the Audience frame describes? Does it fit the budget and timeline the Criteria frame sets? If the answer is no, you’ve found something worth knowing before the work starts.

On the canvas

The software seed declares - **Canvas:** file for its framing collection — each frame draws as a full-file node rather than a card, because a frame is prose meant to be read whole. Blueprints in a spec collection draw as cards from one section, because you scan those. More on the canvas →

Next

• Roles & the Actor
• Writing a Blueprint