Guide Overview

Guides are task-oriented: each one shows how to produce or inspect a specific artifact using the current CLI and project layout. They intentionally call reusable platform commands — if a task needs copying a large project script, that behavior probably belongs in gridalyn/ instead, per Components's placement rule.

The sequence

A study moves through the platform in one order, and the guides below are listed in it rather than alphabetically. The same order appears in three places, which is the strongest evidence it is real rather than imposed: it is the direction imports flow between layers, it is the verb-prefix order of a workflow.yaml's stage ids, and it is the order these guides are written in.

Phase	Layer	What runs it	Guide
Declare the study as a contract	Projects	gridalyn project init, then validate	Build Your Own Project, Project Template
Model what the study acts on	Twin, Assets	gridalyn twin build; stages prefixed build_* / generate_*	Build A Twin, Synthetic Networks From GeoJSON
Design the mechanism — the thing the study exists to do	Simulation, Operations	gridalyn project run; stages prefixed run_*, then analyze_*	Author A Workflow
Validate before believing the result	Projects	sense-check (do the numbers make sense?), regression (did they move?), verify (both, plus artifact status)	Reproducibility
Publish the result outward	Interfaces	stages prefixed export_*; the report contract	Reports And Figures, Open The Dashboard

Two things worth noticing in that table.

Validation is a phase, not an afterthought. In the six light governed studies it is a stage inside the workflow itself (validate_project_outputs), so gridalyn project run cannot report success on a study whose numbers were never examined. The two heavy studies validate operator-side instead, because their runs take hours.

The three validation commands answer three different questions, and the distinction matters more than the similar names suggest: validate asks whether the contract is well-formed, sense-check whether the numbers are plausible, regression whether they moved against a pinned baseline. Nothing answers all three at once except verify, which excludes regression.

Outside the sequence

Write An Extension is the one guide that is not a phase: it shows how to register a component from outside gridalyn without editing it, which applies at whichever phase the component belongs to.

Read Components first if a guide's vocabulary is unfamiliar — every term it uses is defined there or in the Glossary.