NORTHSTAR: Tyler Teaches Typing

*The following is a real NORTHSTAR document, in this monorepo's actual house format, for a product that does not exist and — on current evidence — cannot exist. That is the whole bit. Nothing below is exaggerated for effect beyond the premise itself.*

# NORTHSTAR: Tyler Teaches Typing

## What This Is

A typing-tutor product hosted by TYLER, in-character, using the existing TYLER show bible as its sole source of instructional content. No new writer's-room material — every lesson sentence is drawn from `TYLER/README.md`, `episodes/`, and `lore/`, verbatim or near-verbatim, the same canon-firewall discipline this monorepo already applies everywhere else (plot immutable, surface content swappable).

## Why Now

Every other product in this ecosystem eventually gets a real user-facing UI. Typing tutors are a proven, boring, high-retention category. TYLER is a documentary about a man who won't stay in his own year; teaching someone to type "the quick brown fox" is, relative to everything else this monorepo has shipped tonight, the least ambitious thing in the building. That is not a knock. It is the pitch.

## VS0 — Minimum Viable Lesson

- A single practice screen: source text top, live input bottom, WPM/accuracy computed the standard way (correct chars / elapsed minutes). - Source text is TYLER's own dialogue, pulled from existing episode scripts, unmodified. - No new backend. No IDUNA integration. No Apples. A typing tutor does not need a trust authority; if it turns out it does, that is itself worth an Apple.

## VS1 — Tyler Narrates the Lesson

- Before each practice round, TYLER "introduces" the passage the way he introduces everything else in the show: without ever finishing a sentence about what it actually is. - **This is where the design problem starts, and it is real, not decorative.** Writer's Room Rule #1 (`TYLER/CLAUDE.md`): *Tyler never completes a self-defining sentence.* A typing tutor's entire pedagogical value proposition is telling the user, plainly, what they are about to type and why. Tyler is structurally incapable of the sentence "you are about to type a sentence about—" without the sentence trailing off. This is not a UX bug to be smoothed over. It is canon, and canon does not bend for a feature. - **Working resolution, not a fix**: the lesson text itself carries the instructional weight. Tyler's intro is flavor, not information. The user learns what they're typing by typing it, the way every typing tutor already works — Tyler was never going to be the one to explain the UI to begin with.

## VS2 — Accuracy-Gated Progression

- Lock later chapters' dialogue behind a real accuracy threshold on earlier ones, mirroring the show's own "Attempt" numbering (Attempt Four, Attempt Five, etc.) — you don't see Attempt Five's material until you've cleared Attempt Four's, same as the in-universe Syndicate's own audit order. - **Open question, not resolved here**: whether "The Subscriber's identity is not revealed before Series 2" (Writer's Room Rule #3) means VS2's own progression content is *also* rate-limited past a certain chapter, independent of the user's typing accuracy. If so, a perfect typist still can't unlock Series 2 material early. This would be a first in the typing-tutor genre and is flagged, not decided, here.

## Explicitly Out of Scope

- Multiplayer typing races. This is not a MOBA. Nothing in this monorepo needs to become a MOBA by default just because one already exists two directories over. - Any voice synthesis of Tyler's actual dialogue. The TTS "Listen" button already shipped tonight, for blog posts, using the browser's native `speechSynthesis` API — reusing it here to have "Tyler" read his own unfinished sentences aloud is tempting and explicitly deferred, mostly because nobody has resolved whether the synthesized voice would also refuse to finish its sentences, and that is a genuinely open question this document is not equipped to answer. - Grading the user on whether *they* complete their own sentences. Two characters structurally unable to finish a thought would make for a very short lesson.

## Acceptance Criteria (VS0)

- A user can type a real line of Tyler's actual dialogue and get a real WPM number back. - Nothing about the lesson content is invented; everything traces to an existing script file. - The build is clean. The build is always clean first. Then everything else.