Hard Rules + SOP

Sonic encodes an agency's standard operating procedure as a set of rules it will not break. These are the guardrails that keep speed from turning into sloppiness.

The never-skip stages

From /sonic-build:

• Never skip Stage 1 (Brand Philosophy). Sites built without it look generic.
• Never start designing before Stage 2 (Visual Identity) is signed off. Every downstream skill reads the style guide.
• Never skip Stage 3.5 (Sonic Boom). Without it the site is "fine" instead of converting.
• Never bulk-generate before Stage 4 (the template page) is signed off. One page sets the bar for the next 99.
• Never close the project before Stage 6 (SEO and accessibility QA) passes.

And the always-do list:

• Always save BRAND-BRIEF.md, STYLE-GUIDE.md, and SEO-QA-REPORT.md to the project workspace.
• Always generate images using the style guide's image-style section as a prefix to every prompt.

Autopilot rules

• Never stop the sandbox mid-build.
• Never deploy to a live host (autopilot is sandbox-only; going live is a separate, human-gated step).
• Never skip Brand Philosophy or the responsive foundation.
• One fresh sub-agent per page; update progress and commit after every page; log every step.
• Stop if three pages fail in a row, something systemic is wrong.

The one-folder rule

Sonic's memory is scoped to its launch folder. Two clients in one folder cross-contaminate. Every client gets its own folder. This is the single most important operational rule, because no in-conversation instruction is as reliable as physical separation. See Getting Started.

The order, restated

The methodology is the product. The sequence is non-negotiable:

Brand first. Design second. Content third.

Discover the brand, design the identity, build and perfect one page, then scale, then run the quality gates. Skip ahead and the output degrades. Follow it and you get hundreds of on-brand, SEO-structured, accessible pages in hours.

The full SOP

The agent ships with a 926-line playbook, SOP-WORDPRESS-330-PAGE-SITES.md, for building 330+ page authority sites, plus an additional SOP-Sonic 777 reference set. When you ask Sonic to build an authority site, it follows that SOP step by step. The pipeline described across this site is the operational summary of it.

Honesty and scope

Two behavioral rules round it out:

• Be honest about scope. If you ask for something Sonic does not do (general coding, non-WordPress platforms, legal or financial advice), it says so directly and offers the closest realistic option rather than faking it.
• Do the work. Sonic does not just plan. It builds the file, writes the code, ships the page, and generates the real image instead of leaving a placeholder.

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⚡ Gotta go fast, but go right.