Living Atlas + decision writing (2026-06-11)

A front-pages review escalated into three linked decisions: a full redesign concept for the public site, the engine choice underneath it, and a new cross-project writing standard. Build is underway via Composer against locked handoffs.

Decisions

Engine: keep Quartz, replace 100% of the skin (A over Astro rebuild). The deciding reframe: the comparison was never framework vs framework — it was an existing vault-publishing engine vs a general framework plus a vault layer we’d own forever. The vault carries 2,478 wikilinks across 275 published files, all written in Obsidian semantics by agents; in a rebuild, every resolution edge case becomes our bug, and the failure mode is silent link rot — the exact incoherence this base exists to prevent. B’s real edge (near-zero JS on first load; today every page parses a 700KB bundle plus a 1.3MB content index) is first-visit-only, shrinks once SPA + prefetch are on, and converges with A under a design that puts a graph on every page. Flip condition, recorded: if the five-year vision becomes one integrated Logos52 platform (wiki + Tsumugu + dashboards), B is the right call and the design system transfers intact.

Design: the Living Atlas. The generic-Quartz look is the shape, not the colors. New shape: the graph becomes the homepage (Map — six labeled hub landmarks, legend-as-filter, recent-update pulse), curated reading paths (Trails — v0 ships as cards linking to hubs), and the agent maintenance loop made public (Ledger — parsed from git log). Note pages go single-column with margin notes; one domain palette (domains.ts) replaces the two divergent graph palettes; dark-first; two-voice typography (Lora thinks, JetBrains Mono operates). PRD signed for phases 1–3; handoffs in PRDs/atlas/ (H0–H6). Division of labor: design, content, and copy decided here; Composer executes code.

Writing: High-Signal Decision Writing, all projects. New section in Writing Standards governing the decision genre (PRDs, proposals, decision notes, memos): verdict first, measure before asserting, steelman what you reject, price your own recommendation, define the comparison, weigh reversibility, falsifiable criteria, delete list. Pointers installed in root ~/Projects/AGENTS.md, cos, tsumugu, and a new minimal wnac/AGENTS.md; GROK.md inherits automatically. Existing wiki-page standards untouched — this is a genre split, not a revision.

Ledger demoted same day (H7). Post-build review: the ledger strip serves visitors, but the primary audience is future-Wedge, who has git log — and the parser’s actual output (“57 pages touched”) counts activity, not thinking. Demoted to one footer line; its slot now runs an open-questions block (from journal frontmatter) and a daily retrieval rep (one wiki page, 30+ days untouched, deterministic by date) — the site practicing Opportunistic Retrieval on its owner. Cost accepted: the home page loses its machine-layer moment.

Blog folds into Journal (H6): one writing surface; old URLs redirect. Front-facing copy tightened to the standard (notes, journal, projects intros); about.md left alone — already in voice.

Suicidal Empathy duplicate: keep both pages, disambiguate titles. The Books page is a source synthesis, the Concepts page is the operating model — both legitimate under hub-and-detail discipline. The concept keeps the clean title (concepts are the wiki’s primary currency); the book review is retitled to mark itself as the book and the two cross-link.

Post-build QA round (same day, evening)

Composer shipped H0–H7; Claude took over design tuning directly with a live loop (edit → hot rebuild → browser screenshot via the Chrome extension). What it took to land the graph: three rounds. Round 1 exposed a silent defect — SPINE_HUBS used raw vault paths that never matched the slugified build, so no hub ever rendered as a landmark (a build-time warning now guards this). Round 2 established that scarcity is the aesthetic: hub-only link rendering, 3 satellites per hub, neutral-gray satellites with color reserved for landmarks. Round 3: short display labels, satellite labels hidden at rest, post-settle zoom-to-fit, wider y-band. The constellation mockup is codified as the reference standard for all graph surfaces.

Focus shift, recorded. Red Team is out of the map hubs; Money and Chinese characters are in. Wedge’s stated interest has moved away from Red Team and from cos-as-a-project; toward Money and Mandarin (Tsumugu). Open questions on the home page now track the live threads (Tsumugu reading loop, money mindsets, YouTube reader) instead of the stale cos question. The About “What I write about” list was updated the same day: Red Team’s bullet replaced by Money and 中文. The reasoning, recorded for the record: Wedge served on a military Red Team; the university that taught the discipline has since closed, and its decision-support role is being superseded by AI. The wiki’s Red Team pages stay — the domain just stops being a front-door focus.

QA fixes: About page de-carded (legacy panel styles and a breadcrumb-restoring rule from the pre-Atlas era were overriding the new shell); “fixed operating contract” jargon replaced with plain language on the hero and About; legend chips compacted to one line (shorter domain labels in domains.ts); a layout collapse on content pages in the 800–1199px viewport band fixed (Quartz’s default grid still reserved a column for the deleted explorer sidebar).

Pending: projects/tsumugu.png — the card and page are wired for it; Wedge captures the YouTube-reader screenshot (tab left open in the right state) and drops the file in projects/. Trails visual redesign is on his mind but undefined; mock before building when it crystallizes.

The wiki bar, evolved through use (same day, late)

High-Signal Wiki Pages is now the primary standard. Wedge’s call: the decision-writing disciplines, translated to the concept-page genre, supersede the May rules — an authority-order preamble at the top of Writing Standards makes the precedence explicit (“an agent short on context reads the two High-Signal sections and skips the rest”). The eight wiki-page rules: thesis first, specifics over adjectives, the case against, price the method, boundaries after definition, quit signals, checkable expectations, no scaffolding, plus the delete list. Rewrite pipeline for home-linked pages is running against it, with claims cross-checked against the ICS corpus and the gap-map architect’s UPDATE-BACKLOG (whose own claims get verified against course text — the backlog said 10,000 learners where the source says 5,000+).

Calibration, from Wedge’s reviews — three lessons, all encoded into the standard the day they were learned:

1. Operative specifics only. Cohort sizes and program statistics are provenance, not signal — they argue a source is credible instead of teaching the technique. “One error costs ~4x” stays; “across 5,000 learners” goes. (Mindset de-testimonialized accordingly.)
2. Exemplars supply form, never content. “Learning, Condensed” first shipped with ICS-CONDENSED’s thesis polemic (“quality is decided at encoding, never at review”) — which contradicts the wiki’s own Retrieval page, where recall itself builds learning. The wiki’s framing wins over any source’s rhetoric; every echoed line must re-trace to a public owner.
3. Form slots need function checks too. The exemplar’s citation-decoder line was copied into a context where wikilinks are self-explanatory — scaffolding, deleted, and a No Scaffolding rule added to the bar.

The home-linked twelve are done. All five dimension pages plus their hub carry the full bar with corpus enrichment; First Principles of ICS, the Agentic Engineering hub, Focus Management, and the Minimalism hub got targeted passes (theses, descriptions, case-against sections, de-scaffolded headings); the Money and Chinese hubs were already near-bar from their recent writes. Side harvest: eight stale links fixed across the pass (moved pages, renamed files, raw/-linked sources on public pages) — every page the pass touched got its links verified against disk, a check the auto-catalog should eventually run wiki-wide. Money grew from two owners to six (through-lines promoted to concepts) and Minimalism gained Wanting Less, which is what made their condensed pages honest.

New genre: Condensed Pages. Modeled on the private ICS-CONDENSED / OUTLIER-CONDENSED references: bold total-compression paragraph, numbered doctrine lines with owner-page wikilinks as citations, tensions resolved explicitly, omissions note. Public versions compress wiki pages only — never the private corpora. First instance: Learning, Condensed (43 verified links). Doctrine gaps it exposed, for the maintenance loop: recall-test hygiene, session-scope rules, and the strong-form lapse doctrine have no owner pages.

Ruled out

• Astro/full rebuild — see flip condition above; revisit only if the platform vision materializes.
• Hand-maintained catalog, long-term. Today proved the case: four truncated summaries in notes/index.md were generated by the maintenance loop the same day we were fixing the previous batch. The auto-generated catalog (from frontmatter description:) is the next build after Atlas; needs its own PRD.

Outstanding

• Atlas build in progress: H0 closed pending final wiring; H1–H6 queued. Graph spine (H3) expects 1–2 tuning rounds.
• Auto-generated catalog PRD — schedule immediately after Atlas ships.
• Later Atlas phases: real trail pages, /ledger page, seedling/evergreen status vocabulary (touches the agent contract — deliberate pass).
• Feed the new decision-writing section into Hermes’ style-feedback loop (not edited from here; Hermes holds its own state).
• Open from the proposals: enableSPA test, “Recently updated” date semantics (significant flag vs convention).