  The traditional approach to nuclear physics encodes phase shift information
in a nucleon-nucleon (NN) potential, producing a nucleon-level interaction that
captures the sub-GeV consequences of QCD. A further reduction to the nuclear
scale is needed to produce an effective interaction for soft Hilbert spaces,
such as those employed in the shell model. Here we describe an alternative
construction of this effective interaction, from QCD directly to the nuclear
scale, that is direct and precise. This eliminates the need for constructing
and renormalizing the high-momentum NN potential. Instead, continuum phase
shifts and mixing angles are used directly at the nuclear scale. The method
exploits the analytic continuity in energy of HOBET (Harmonic-Oscillator-Based
Effective Theory) to connect bound states to continuum solutions at specific
energies. The procedure is systematic, cutoff independent, and convergent,
yielding keV accuracy at NNLO or N$^3$LO, depending on the channel. Lepage
plots are provided.
