Written down
Most of the systems I've built reconcile: you declare what should be running, something keeps checking what actually is, and every difference becomes work. The times I've seen written values hold, they ran the same loop. They sat next to the roadmap, showed up when goals were set, and anyone could hold a piece of work up against them. When values drift, it's rarely because people stop believing the words. The work changes, or how people treat each other changes, and nothing checks either one against the words anymore.
So before Ymur had anything to show, we wrote down how we work: a page called House, with eight defaults for what we do first when nobody has said otherwise. We call them defaults on purpose. An aspiration describes who you hope to be. A default describes what you actually do, and you can check it.
Kept close to the work
A default lives where the decision gets made: in the template a plan starts from, the checklist a release runs through, the conventions an agent reads before it opens a pull request. It's the nearest thing to hand when nobody has said otherwise. Each thing Ymur makes tailors its own language and style from House. None of them change it.
Specific enough to check
"We value quality" can't fail. "Safe to run before you've read the docs" can: run the default invocation of anything we ship and see whether it did something destructive or surprising. "Evidence, or it's a draft" can: find a claim in a design doc with nothing behind it, and the doc is a draft. "Agents propose; a person decides what ships" can: look for anything that touched something real before a person read it.
That's the test for whether a sentence belongs on the page: some specific piece of work has to be able to break it. If nothing could, it's a slogan.
Revisited as the work changes
House is revisited whenever the work gives a reason, and at least after each release. A default that stops fitting gets rewritten or removed, and the change is written down here. The first set is eight defaults, and this note is the first entry in the record that follows it.
What gets held to it
Each thing we make should show at least one default holding:
- lúr gives every agent its own small computer and database, built on the idea that an idle agent should cost only storage, wake when something connects, and fork without becoming its parent's twin. Every claim about it gets a written prediction before it gets measured. Evidence, or it's a draft.
- laug keeps a warm pool of throwaway Temporal clusters that load a release, break something on purpose, and end in one of two words: advance or block. Assume the thing upstream will change.
- kleya turns a recording into an instrument you can play. It runs on one page with no account and nothing uploaded, and saves a whole song as one file you keep. What you make stays yours.
- grith hosts game worlds that wake on demand and sleep when nobody's there, keeping each save as a world memory of only what changed, one you can carry away. Built to tend, not to watch.
The next notes go deeper on each of these, and on anything that didn't hold.