a starting page, and it points at the example rather than replacing it

Someone in an empty repository saying "set this up" has nothing to read. The four
primitives say what things are and deliberately not what to do, which leaves a
set of primitives with no starting point — a puzzle rather than a foundation.

Two questions carry it: what can a reader not already know, which is what you
publish; and what do you need that nothing provides, which is a gap. Everything
else is conditional on having something to say, and the page says plainly that a
file carrying no delta should not exist.

It ends by pointing at jeffry/homelab-cluster and saying that if the two
disagree, the example is right. Precedent beats description, and a page about
writing documents should not be the longest document.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>

.loom/published/starting.md

@@ -0,0 +1,68 @@
+# Starting one of these in a repository
+
+**Make a `.loom/` directory. Everything else follows from two questions.**
+
+---
+
+## What can a reader not already know?
+
+**That is what you publish**, in `.loom/published/`, as ordinary documents.
+
+**Not what your service does** — its code says that. **Not how Kubernetes or
+Kafka or React work** — that is somebody else's documentation, and a copy of it
+here goes stale silently while reading as though it were true.
+
+> **Write the delta.** *"The default ingress class publishes to the internet, so
+> omitting it is how you leak something."* **Nobody could have guessed that, and
+> nothing else here will tell them.**
+
+**A good page ends with how to check it is still true**, and a date. *Nothing
+serves the truth about a running system, so the only mechanism is somebody
+looking.*
+
+## What do you need that nothing provides?
+
+**That is a gap**, in `.loom/gaps/`.
+
+**The test: could you say whose job it is?** *If yes, it is a claim against them
+and belongs with them. If no, it is a gap.*
+
+**Record what you are doing instead** — *"we are using Docker Hub for now."*
+**Forgetting it was provisional is the disease; the provisional answer is fine.**
+
+---
+
+## Then, only if you have something to say
+
+**`.loom/externals/`** — a copy of somebody's document you depend on, with what
+you use and what you expected and did not find, beside it. See
+[externals](https://git.hypertheory-labs.dev/loom/externals).
+
+**`.loom/venues/`** — choices you made about something with no document to hang
+them on. *Kafka, React, HTTP.*
+
+**`.loom/event-log.md`** — decisions, if you are keeping them here.
+
+> **A file that carries no delta should not exist.** *If you do exactly what
+> somebody else's document says, write nothing — recording the adoption is
+> ceremony.*
+
+## Write a `.loom/README.md`
+
+**Say what is in `published/` and why somebody would want it.** *Link the
+documents. One line for the curious about what `.loom` is.*
+
+**Nobody should need to understand any of this to use it** — *they are documents
+in a folder, and a reader who ignores the vocabulary entirely should still get
+what they came for.*
+
+---
+
+## Look at one instead of reading this
+
+**[`jeffry/homelab-cluster`](https://git.hypertheory-labs.dev/jeffry/homelab-cluster)**
+— *six documents, one gap, no decomposition, and a `README` that says what the
+root documents are for and what these are for.*
+
+**It is a better answer than this page**, and if the two ever disagree, it is
+right.

README.md

@@ -9,8 +9,11 @@
 - [Recording decisions](.loom/published/recording-decisions.md) — what an entry
   says, and why it is never revised
 - [Publication](.loom/published/publication.md) — what `.loom/published/` means
+- [Starting one of these in a repository](.loom/published/starting.md) — the one
+  page here that tells you what to do, because a set of primitives with no
+  starting point is a puzzle
 
-**Nothing here says what to *do*.** *`loom/annotating`, `loom/cart` and
+**Nothing else here says what to *do*.** *`loom/annotating`, `loom/cart` and
 `loom/externals` are built on these and are where the practices live.*
 
 **Most repositories will never read this.** *Its audience is people building