Use Cases
See how different kinds of teams and individuals could use aDNA to organize their work. Each scenario follows an illustrative persona through a concrete deployment.
Illustrative, not case studies
The distinction is load-bearing and we would rather lose the persuasive version of this page than blur it. A case study reports what someone did; a scenario shows what a deployment looks like. Only one of those is evidence, and pages that quietly present the second as the first are the reason the first is worth anything.
How to read one
Each scenario names a starting situation, the vaults the persona ends up with, and the decisions that got them there. The useful part is usually the shape — how many vaults, where the boundaries fall, what stays local — because that is the part that transfers. The specific tools and counts will not match your situation and are not meant to.
If none of them fits, that is a legitimate outcome rather than a gap in your understanding: aDNA is a structure for organising context, and plenty of real deployments look like none of these four.
The scenarios
Solo Developer
Sam is a freelance developer working solo on 3-4 client projects simultaneously. They use AI agents heavily — for code generation, documentation…
Startup
Alex is CTO of a 12-person AI startup building a developer tool. The team ships weekly, context switches constantly between features, and relies…
Research Lab
Maya is a principal investigator running a computational biology lab with 8 researchers, 3 AI agents, and a growing mountain of experimental data. She…
Enterprise Team
Jordan manages a 50-person platform engineering organization at a financial services company. Three teams run concurrent AI-agent-assisted projects…
Educator
Sarah teaches a graduate course on AI-augmented knowledge work at a research university. Her students come from diverse backgrounds — computer…
Open Source Project
Kai maintains a popular open-source data processing library with 200+ contributors, 50 open issues, and a codebase that's outgrown any single person's…
See yourself in one of these?
The scenarios are illustrative — the path is real. Start your own vault, or read the standard it is built on.