Put the value ladder on the site's spine

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Generated at: 2026-09-04T11:23:58.207Z UTC · source: committed helm-expt evidence for this rendered repository document.

Status, 2026-09-01: phase 1 landed earlier (the ladder table lives on the deployment page and the ConfigHub page leads with upload, release, promote, and the chaining story). Phase 2's homepage work landed with the six starting questions and the hero ladder terminal; the nav decision stays parked with the maintainer. Phase 3 moved past this brief's assumption: the composition rung is no longer only a report, because the workshop plugin ships cub stack certify and cub stack sandbox as an installable prototype, while the in-product gate remains proposed. The deployment and platform pages now say exactly that.

Planning brief. A three-lens review of the site (an AI-cloud / GPU-platform operator, a GitOps platform architect, and a product-accuracy pass) converged on one structural finding: the site jumps from check to promote and skips the middle of the value ladder. upload and release have no first-class page, the composition (stack) rung is shown as a report rather than a step, and there is no path that reads as an inference-shaped spine. The cub vocabulary is now settled (cub-noun-vocabulary.md), so the middle can be named.

The ladder

free      check · deploy
account   upload · release · promote
paid      govern
stack     certify · sandbox   (the composition rung)

upload = cub variant upload, release = cub release publish, promote = cub variant promote. The site jumps check → promote and never shows upload (into ConfigHub, where public config chains into private) or release (go live, the cluster pulls) as steps.

Honesty guardrails

These keep the site's best asset, which the same review named the crown jewel: every claim receipt-backed, nothing overclaimed.

Only shipped verbs become first-class spine steps. check, deploy, upload, release, promote, govern are real commands. cub stack and the composition certify gate are proposals, so the composition rung is presented through what is proven (the Kubara receipts and the certified-bundle evidence), with the certify gate marked as roadmap. Do not render a gate the product does not have.
Helm-first stays the front door. The ladder is the depth behind it, not a new pitch. A Helm-grounded surface is the credibility a cautious operator trusts.
Do not over-elevate the frontier. The AI/GPU path is answered with evidence, not volume. Prominence does not fix "unproven"; proof does.
Do not add to the link farm. The ladder organizes existing links; it does not pile on more. The homepage is already dense.

Phase 1 - the spine anchor

One PR, highest value, entirely from shipped verbs.

One ladder diagram. A single picture of check · deploy → upload · release · promote → govern, with the free/account/paid bands and the real cub command under each verb. The one-glance view of the whole CLI the review asked for. It lands on the deployment page and is linked from the homepage.
Reframe the ConfigHub page as the account spine. Today it argues "keep a result," which is custody-lite. Make it upload → release → promote, and lead with the chaining story: upload brings a public base into your private org, links inject your private values, protection keeps your choices while upstream fixes still flow down. That is the value a plain registry cannot offer, and it fixes two findings at once (the missing middle and the undersold moat).

Phase 2 - align the frame

Nav that reflects the ladder. Give the account spine a nav home and fix the Deployment / Deploy label blur. Minimal, no bloat.
Homepage doors acknowledge the middle. Between "is it right?" (check) and "can I promote it?" (promote) sits "put it in ConfigHub and go live" (upload, release). A light touch, not a new section.
Wire the certified-bundle receipts into the platform page. The one artifact that looks like composition evidence is linked once from deep in the catalog and never from the platform page.

Phase 3 - the composition rung, honestly

The parts that are site work now, with the product builds marked as roadmap.

Present the composition step through proven evidence. The Kubara path and the certified-bundle receipts are the stack rung today; show them as the rung, with the composition certify gate marked proposed (it is a report, not a gate - see composition-certification.md).
Surface the inference-shaped path honestly. The eks-inference bundles, the AICR proofs, and the one real inference request already exist; present them as the AI/GPU reading of the same ladder, evidence-forward, without claiming a GPU runtime or a certify gate that is not built.
Product gaps stay filed, not faked. The disruptive-change classifier (#1660) and the composition-certify gate are builds; the site names them as roadmap and does not render them as shipped.

Sequencing

Phase 1 closes the structural gap and tells the chaining story. Phase 2 aligns the frame around it. Phase 3 gives the stack and inference rungs an honest home. Each phase is a site change from shipped material; nothing waits on a product build except the parts explicitly marked roadmap.