Project lifecycle

Matemium treats creation as a production journey with explicit decisions and artifacts. This makes long or agent-assisted projects easier to understand, resume, and repair.

Shared foundation

Every production path begins with three phases.

1. Project creation

The workspace exists, has a stable project identity, and can store source, briefs, media, and output.

2. Project description

You and the agent settle the rare-changing intent:

What idea is being explained?
Who is it for?
What should the viewer understand?
What must remain accurate?
What visual language fits the subject?

3. Passport and production path

The project establishes its production identity and selects visual-first, voice synthesis, or custom voice.

Branch-specific production

After the foundation, the roadmap follows the selected path. A visual-first project can move directly through content, orchestration, authoring, rendering, repair, and delivery. Audio paths add narration, timing, validation, or reconciliation phases.

See Choose a production path for the complete differences.

Project memory

The desktop does not rely on chat history as the only memory of the work. It stores durable artifacts beneath the project:

Description
Passport
Roadmap
Tape content
Orchestration
Narration and timing artifacts where relevant
scenes.py and optional helpers

This matters because conversation is temporary; approved project intent should survive model changes, restarts, and later revisions.

Phase gates

Later phases can depend on earlier decisions. For example:

Scene authoring should not begin before the intended tape content is understood.
TTS generation should not happen before narration and final timing are ready.
A production-path change can invalidate downstream work.

The current roadmap state should be treated as the source of truth for what the agent is allowed to do next.

Changing direction

You can revise a project, but foundational changes should be explicit:

Update the description or passport.
Identify downstream artifacts affected by the change.
Let the roadmap mark those phases for revision.
Re-approve important content and orchestration.
Render and validate again.

Do not silently edit a foundational decision while continuing as if later work were still approved.

Delivery does not end ownership

Matemium-generated lessons, videos, scripts, images, and other original output belong to you. Delivery means that a validated artifact is ready for its intended destination; it does not upload or publish by default.