Lifecycle-Aligned Guidance
Guidance for "what should I do next?" reflects the user's actual lifecycle chapter, active workflow step, and prerequisite task state — read from the same Journey State Machine the workspace chrome reads.
"What should I do next?" is the question a new user asks constantly and an experienced user still asks at the beginning of each new stage or after a period away from the project. The quality of the answer depends entirely on how well the system understands the current state of the user's work — what has been done, what is in progress, what is blocked, and what the governing lifecycle stage says should happen next.
Reading the Same Source of Truth
ProjectXL's AI assistant does not infer lifecycle state from workbook data fields or maintain a separate internal model of what phase the project is in. It reads chapter and execution authority from the same sources the workspace chrome reads: the Journey State Machine for lifecycle stage and the Journey Flow Engine for the current step projection. This means that when the user asks "what should I do next?", the answer reflects exactly where the system's governing model says the user is — not an approximation derived from a status field or a date comparison.
Prerequisite-Aware Guidance
Lifecycle-aligned guidance is not just about knowing the current stage. It is about knowing which tasks within that stage are complete, which are in-flight, and which still need to be done before a specific action becomes appropriate. When a user asks about an action that depends on prerequisites that are not yet satisfied, the AI explains the specific precondition — which task needs to be completed, which data needs to be current, which governance step needs to have been taken — and points to where that work can be done.