awslabs / awslabs/aidlc-workflows

[Feature]: Strip presentation styling from model-facing Mermaid diagrams

Closed Beginner friendly
#591 1 comment 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
enhancement
Dominant language
TypeScript
Stars
4.6k
Forks
827
Avg merge
1d 21h
Merged PRs (30d)
165

Description

### Description

Two rule files spend tokens on Mermaid presentation styling that carries no information for the model:

1. common/process-overview.md (stated purpose: "AI model context loading") contains 20 style/linkStyle lines. The ALWAYS/CONDITIONAL status is already written in the node labels, so the colors are redundant for the model.
2. inception/workflow-planning.md Step 6 instructs the model to generate styled diagrams into execution-plan.md, including a styling rules block and color guidelines. Style syntax is a common source of the Mermaid parsing errors that common/content-validation.md exists to guard against, and the generated style block is reloaded as prior context by every later stage that loads the execution plan.

Proposal: remove the style/linkStyle lines from process-overview.md, and change workflow-planning.md Step 6 to request a plain flowchart with EXECUTE/SKIP/COMPLETED status written into node labels, with an explicit instruction not to emit style, classDef, or linkStyle lines.

### Use Case

Fewer tokens at rule load and at artifact generation, fewer Mermaid validation failures, and execution-plan.md stays readable in any renderer.

### Version

v1 (current)

### Area

Inception phase rules

### Additional Context

Reference implementation on my fork: https://github.com/Emillock/aidlc-workflows/tree/perf/slim-model-context (commit 8422afd).

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Research direction

Start by reading common/process-overview.md and inception/workflow-planning.md Step 6, then review common/content-validation.md for the Mermaid constraints mentioned in the issue. The work is complete when the process overview has no style/linkStyle lines and Step 6 requests plain flowcharts with status labels and no style, classDef, or linkStyle lines.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
markdown
Domain
documentation
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
2/5
Estimated time
1-3 hours
Activity status
Quiet
Clarity
Clearly specified
Newbie friendliness
76/100

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