65. The Starter Kit Became the First Product Direction

Once Core existed as a proposal, the next question became practical again.

What should a person actually download or copy?

The answer was the Starter Kit.

This was a new milestone.

AIFC had moved through several forms:

AIFC Standard
-> object and pattern model discovered by Lab
-> Core / community model distilled from the standard
-> Core v0.1 proposal generated from existing evidence
-> AIFC Starter Kit as the first usable product

This was the first moment when AIFC was not only a standard, not only a reference community, not only a Lab model, but a product direction.

The Starter Kit had to support several situations.

A person might copy it into a clean directory for the first time.

A person might upgrade an older kit.

A person might already have a community and want to start a second case.

A person might use one kit across several communities: work, family, band, school, or something else.

This made the Starter Kit more than a folder template.

It needed operating modes.

It needed initialization levels.

It needed scoped skills.

It needed a way to distinguish Core definitions from community-owned state.

It needed to know whether it was being used for the first time, upgraded, or continued.

And it needed an AI assistant to begin in the right place:

Read aifc/README.md and initialize this workspace according to AIFC.

That sentence became the product interface.