@bigsteele/the-big-sean

The Big Sean — the Launch Report Card. A collaboration between Big Steele and LaSean Pickens.

Point it at an app and it grades two things at once: can this take customers without hurting them (launch readiness, L01–L15, sixty checks) and can it run the business without you (autonomy, D01–D20, eighty checks, rubric KALDR-AUTONOMY-1.0). One hundred forty checks, every one PASS, FAIL, UNKNOWN, or N/A with evidence attached — no partial credit, no "mostly works." The output is a report card: a verified score out of 100, a band, a ceiling, gate status, category cards, the path to 100, and every finding cited to a file and line, a query, or a page.

The audit itself is run by Claude Code against your repo and, where reachable, your live system — read-only, no edits, no questions, nothing spent. Step 0 is two deterministic scans, run for you before the agent starts: the Big Steele AI Audit (what the software automates, and how much of it an agent could operate) and Wiremap (how far it is from one change in one place, and whether a capability map exists for the agent to read before it searches). Their findings are evidence the protocol cites, their scores appear on the summary card as the AI readiness and Wiring lines, and Wiremap's block map is what the agent uses to navigate the codebase instead of searching it. The deliverable lands at the repo root, named for the app: The Big Sean - .md and .html. This package ships the protocol and the tools around it:

npx @bigsteele/the-big-sean            # drop THE-BIG-SEAN.md into the repo, paste it into Claude Code
npx @bigsteele/the-big-sean --run      # or open claude with the protocol already loaded
npx @bigsteele/the-big-sean --check    # after the audit: re-compute the report's math yourself
npx @bigsteele/the-big-sean --stdout   # print the protocol

It grades against your North Star, not the rubric's

A rubric with 140 checks will always find things missing. Before any grading, the audit establishes what the software is actually for, from evidence in the repository: the pricing page, the money path, the schema, the code that got the most effort. That becomes NORTH-STAR.md (the one sentence, the value moment, the money path, the stage, the three to five workflows the business dies without, and what is deliberately out of scope), and every finding afterwards has to earn its place against it.

So each recommendation carries one line saying which workflow or money path it protects, the order follows the business rather than the rubric's numbering, and anything that cannot make that connection lands in a section called "Rubric items that do not serve your North Star" with a reason it waits. The audit is not allowed to tell you to build something your product does not need just because a check exists for it.

What it targets

The audit reads this repository, and any live system it reaches must be one this repository names: a Supabase project ref in the env or supabase/config.toml, an account id in CI, a host named in deploy config. A project ref written only in a planning document is treated as a claim to confirm, never as the target. Tools do not choose: list_projects, a linked CLI project, and an MCP server's configured connection are candidates that must match a ref the repo names. No match means no query, and the checks that needed it are UNKNOWN with the reason recorded in SOURCES.md. Read-only access to a database that is not yours is still access that is not yours.

The Big Steele AI Audit that runs as Step 0 touches nothing at all: no network, no database, no shell. It reads files in the folder you point it at.

Before you run it

This is a large scan, not a quick check. The agent reads everything in the repository it can reach, spawns multiple sub-agents against the codebase, probes the live system read-only where your credentials allow, and writes a long report: 140 graded checks with evidence. Expect a long session and a lot of tokens. big-sean --run says this and asks before it starts (--yes skips the question); the protocol file says it at the top so whoever pastes it sees it too. It changes nothing: no edits, no commits, no deploys, no messages, no spending.

Prove the number

The protocol makes the auditing agent write its own validator and show its math. --check is the second opinion: it reads .planning/launch-audit/grade.json (or any file you point it at) and re-computes everything by the same rules, implemented independently here:

• Only PASS, FAIL, UNKNOWN, N/A. A PASS or FAIL with zero evidence entries is rejected. An N/A without a reason is rejected. A check that was never given a written test is rejected. If the file is rejected, fix the grade.json, not the validator.
• Total possible = the weights of every check that is not N/A. Verified = PASS points as a percentage of that — the headline. Ceiling = PASS + UNKNOWN. Coverage = PASS + FAIL. Bands: A ≥ 90, B ≥ 80, C ≥ 70, D ≥ 60, F below.
• Gates: any weight-5 FAIL is LAUNCH BLOCKED regardless of score. Any weight-5 UNKNOWN is NOT VERIFIED FOR LAUNCH. A report with unknowns is INCOMPLETE and says so next to its number.

Exit codes from --check: 0 gates clear, 2 blocked or not verified, 1 rejected file.

What the audit never does

Read-only, by contract: no edits to source, config, migrations, dependencies, database, or any connected service. No commits, branches, deploys, messages, or spending. It never prints a secret or a customer's personal data, and it never says "production ready" — it says what it verified and what it did not.

After the card

Every report card ends the same way, and so does the agent: after it prints the summary it recommends sending the card in, naming the single hardest thing it found and why a second opinion on that item is worth having. Upload it at bigsteele.com/scan and Big Steele and LaSean Pickens, who wrote the rubric, write back the three fixes that come first, in order. Free, no call required, no pitch inside it. The recommendation is tuned to the result: a blocked launch gets "before you spend a week fixing the wrong thing first", a clean pass gets congratulated and offered a second pair of eyes on the ordering. If the read turns into a build, it is the first mile of that engagement. The live Scan Analysis call is $497, booked from the same page.

The name

Big Steele wrote the machine. LaSean Pickens wrote the standard. The Big Sean is what happens when an app has to face both.