01 — Principles
Summary
The rules the tool runs on, collected because most are implemented as absences — no free-text input, no backend, no score, no risk acceptance — and an absence is the easiest thing in a codebase to break politely. Each principle carries three parts: the statement, the reason, and how a violation would be caught, because a principle nobody can test is a preference. The set includes the two 9 August simulation rules verbatim (a simulated acceptance must never be confusable with a real one; simulate the role, not the named individual) and the variant rule that makes renderings governable: a persona may change emphasis, ordering, vocabulary and format, and may never change what is being accepted — mechanically checkable here, because the library gives facts identity and a fact-set diff across variants must be empty.
Key concepts
- Store the choices, never the answers — P1 — implemented as the absence of any text input
- Computed, never asserted — P3 — every conclusion about the visitor traces to a model function
- The variant rule — P11 — an empty fact-set diff, checkable without judgement
- The two simulation rules — P12 — carried verbatim because document 08 builds the machinery they govern
Key ideas
- Nearly every rule here was purchased with a specific mistake — document 12 has the receipts.
- “Not sure” resolves to present-but-unverified, because assuming absence is the comfortable error.
- Every personalised result ends on something the visitor can do; the hosted case ends on a request.
- The gap is conceded as where the value came from before it is named as the danger.