Ten philosophical statements written in October 2025. Each one became a concrete engineering practice. The header is the original idea. The block underneath is what it actually became.
Design, plan, and execution are linked through a continuous protocol, run by separate layers.
Became: the Session Protocol — Verify, Plan, Execute, Validate run in one unbroken flow. The gap between deciding and doing is where bugs live; the protocol closes it.AI is a working partner. Roles are explicit, not blended.
Became: the two-layer model — Claude Web plans, Claude Code executes, the human sets constraints. Three roles, one system, no confusion about who decides what.Architecture and intent evolve continuously.
Became:FSE_STATE.md — carried forward across every session, updated at every exit, read at every entry. The plan has a home and that home is version-controlled.
Each change refines the system.
Became: no sprints, no backlogs, no tickets in a separate tool. The state file is the backlog. Priorities change where decisions are made, not where they are reported.Unnecessary friction kills momentum; deliberate friction protects quality.
Became: the CLI auto-readsFSE.md. Infrastructure check runs automatically. The human never re-explains context the system already has. Onboarding a new solution fits in one session. The Counter-Point Protocol preserves intentional friction at exactly the points where the agent might otherwise drift.
The why lives beside the what — context executes logic.
Became:FSE.md is not documentation about the code. It is the operating context. The agent's behavior is a function of what that file says. Change the file, change the behavior.
Change is constant; growth is forced by reality, not bloat.
Became:FSE.md splits when it grows past 15 KB. FSE_POLICE.md is born the first time a standing order is violated. The document ecosystem expands only where expansion is forced by reality.
Every decision is traceable and accountable.
Became: the Self-Healing Build Loop. Every error is visible. Every retry is logged. The Lessons Learned registry is an honest record of what the system got wrong — nothing is hidden to protect appearances.Every interaction strengthens shared intelligence.
Became: a pattern proven in one solution informs the others. Tiered docs capture institutional knowledge in files, not in people. When a pattern graduates, it is promoted into the universal FSE template.Systems live, learn, and evolve perpetually.
Became:FSE_STATE.md always ends with Next Session Priorities. There is always a next step. A session never closes with "done" — it closes with "here is where the next session begins."
The tenets are not rules to follow. They are properties of the system. Build the system and you are following them automatically.