Chapter 00: Front Matter
This manual is the public, customer-safe explanation of the live 7DEA product. It is written for people who need to understand the platform seriously: new users, returning operators, reviewers, commercial evaluators, and colleagues who need a durable reference instead of oral tradition. It is not an internal runbook and it is not a promotional brochure. It is the public operating guide for the product as customers actually encounter it.
7DEA becomes much easier to use once you stop asking every page to do the same job. The billing page owns commercial truth. The dashboard owns signed-in working posture. The deliverable view owns artifact truth. The account page owns sensitive identity and data-rights actions. Aegis helps interpret those surfaces, but it does not replace them. This manual is built around that discipline, because most user confusion comes from collapsing route, entitlement, and artifact state into one blurry expectation.
What 7DEA is
7DEA is a trust-first AI governance platform built around lenses, structured deliverables, and guided explanation. It helps a team frame a governance question, choose a baseline perspective, produce a draft artifact, refine that artifact responsibly, and distribute or export the result in a controlled way when the state and plan permit it. It is designed to make governance work more legible and more defensible, not to replace the people who remain accountable for the underlying decisions.
What 7DEA is not
7DEA is not a promise of automatic compliance, legal advice, or a replacement for internal accountability. The platform can organize the problem, sharpen the next action, and help produce structured outputs worth reviewing. It cannot and should not pretend that a single tool eliminates the need for judgment.
This manual also does not disclose secrets, credentials, internal-only URLs, hidden administrative surfaces, private infrastructure details, or unpublished operational procedures. Internal handoff material informed the structure and accuracy of this guide, but not at the expense of public safety.
How to read this manual
Read by need, not by guilt. If you are new, start with Getting Started and Billing before you worry about edge cases. If you are already working inside the app, jump to the chapter that matches the page you are on. If you are blocked by a state label, a gate, or an Aegis behavior, read the system-states and troubleshooting chapters before assuming the product is contradicting itself.
Reading paths by need
- If you are evaluating fit, read Chapters 01, 03, 06, and 13.
- If you are beginning a real first session, read Chapters 01, 02, 03, and 04.
- If you are debugging a locked control or puzzling state, read Chapters 08, 11, and 12.
- If you are onboarding a colleague or team, read Chapters 09, 10, 11, and 13.
The four truths users should keep separate
Route truth tells you what category of decision the current page owns.
Commercial truth tells you whether the current account is exploratory, trial, or paid.
Artifact truth tells you whether the output is Draft, Final, or not yet ready for the action you want.
Trust-bar truth tells you what the live product is signaling about current runtime posture, readiness, and reproducibility.
When users confuse those truths, the product seems unpredictable. When they read them separately, the next move becomes much easier to justify.
How context help fits in
Context help is not a second product. It is the route-aware index into this manual. It works best when you ask for help from the page that already raised the question. If the dashboard is unclear, use the dashboard anchor. If billing is unclear, use the billing anchor. If a deliverable state feels wrong, use the lifecycle or export anchors. The most reliable way to get value from the docs is to keep the help request attached to the live route.
The public baseline before Hermes
This manual replaces the previous public manual with a smaller, more disciplined corpus. It uses a stronger handoff-style backbone, preserves public safety, and prefers route-aware explanations over repetitive casebooks. Future changes should extend clarity, not volume for its own sake.