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🌑 Guided — aguidetocloud.com/guided/

Cheap enough that it's accessible to everyone. The opposite of $79 cert prep.

Guided is Earth's natural satellite. It's an Astro app that lives at /guided/ and shares Earth's gravity — same Zen tokens, same nav, same footer, same theme toggle. From a code perspective it's part of Earth's body (One Body Two Organs).

But Guided has its own identity for cross-planet referencing. When other planets list "what's in our universe", Guided gets its own logo and one-liner. It's not just "the cert section of aguidetocloud" — it's the affordable practice exam moon, free study guides included.

It is also the only paid product in the cosmos, which earns it the 100% availability SLA.

What it is, in one screen

Surface What it does
aguidetocloud.com/guided/ Hub — every cert track Sush teaches, with a Practice or Study CTA
aguidetocloud.com/guided/<cert>/ Per-cert page — overview, study guide table of contents, "Buy practice ($9)"
aguidetocloud.com/guided/<cert>/practice/ The paid practice quiz — Stripe checkout → access token → quiz
aguidetocloud.com/guided/<cert>/study-guide/ The free study guide — modules, mind maps, exam-blueprint coverage
aguidetocloud.com/embed/<cert>/practice/ Embeddable practice for Substack / blog / external sites
aguidetocloud.com/data/questions/<cert>.json The question JSON — fetched at runtime by the practice quiz (NOT inlined into the page)

Identity

Element Decision
Visual register Same as Earth — Zen system, indigo, Inter, 8-px grid. No deviation.
What makes it distinct The pricing voice, the accessibility framing, the SLA-first posture
Pricing voice "$9, not $79" · "affordable" · "if you pass, you got more than your money's worth" — never "unlock", "premium", "pro tier"
Logo / icon (for cross-planet rail) Pending Phase 4 — needs its own SVG distinct from Earth's "A" badge

Belief language (Guided's specific voice)

Guided sits inside Earth's voice register, but adds two notes:

  1. Accessibility before everything. Pricing is the moral product feature. "Cheap enough that it's accessible to everyone." Never reposition this as anchor pricing or psychology framing.
  2. Free study, paid practice. The study guides are free forever. The $9 is for the practice exam (the part that costs to write, validate, and keep current). Be honest about this trade.
  3. No fake scarcity. No "only X left", no "ends today", no countdown timers. Ever.

Cosmos placement & SLA

Guided is the paid product anchor of cosmos law #6: no paid content crosses cosmic boundaries via free pathways. This is the exact reason the law exists.

What this means in practice:

  • Practice exam questions are NEVER mentioned, paraphrased, or surfaced on any other planet (CMD, Shift, Plain AI, Agentic, Claw, the MCP Move)
  • Free-tier endpoints (CMD's /cmd-index.json, Plain AI's HTML, etc.) MUST NOT include any paid content
  • The MCP server has a hardcoded allowlist preventing it from fetching paid URLs
  • Free planets that share data feeds publish ONLY free content; the paid content lives behind Stripe access tokens on a different code path

The Practice Exam SLA (non-negotiable)

Practice exams are the paid product. 100% availability is non-negotiable.

Any change that touches PracticeQuiz.tsx, question JSON, practice.astro, the question data pipeline, checkout/payment flow, or the Astro build config MUST follow the SLA protocol — see the Practice Exam SLA section in ~/.copilot/copilot-instructions.md and the Deployment Playbook (step 18).

Highlights:

  • Pre-change: verify practice exams work BEFORE making changes
  • During work: verify after EVERY code change. Don't batch risky changes.
  • React Rules of Hooks: never put early return statements before useState/useMemo/useEffect hooks
  • Build output check: practice HTML <50 KB (not 1 MB — means data is being inlined again); dataUrl points to /guided/data/questions/, NOT /guided/api/questions/
  • Post-deploy: curl -s https://www.aguidetocloud.com/guided/data/questions/az-900.json | head -c 100 must return JSON, not HTML
  • If practice breaks: revert first, investigate second. Don't debug on production.
  • Growing test suite: any new bug found in production becomes an automated check in test-guided-qa.cjs BEFORE the fix is deployed

One Body, Two Organs

Guided shares Earth's chrome. Any change to nav, footer, fonts, tokens, theme toggle, or shared chrome MUST be applied to BOTH platforms (Hugo Earth + Astro Guided) in the SAME commit/session.

Source of truth for the parity-file map: zen-system-quickref.md.

Architecture, in one paragraph

Guided is Astro 6 + React in the guided repo. Question data is prebuilt to /data/questions/<cert>.json by scripts/build-question-data.mjs and fetched at runtime — not inlined into the practice page (that broke things in April 2026 and broke the SLA for ~12 hours). Stripe checkout creates an access token; the practice page validates the token server-side before serving the quiz. Embeds are first-class — Substack and external sites can drop the practice quiz in via the /embed/<cert>/practice/ route. Deploys to Cloudflare Pages.