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 asked whether .loom/declines.md was a thing or had drifted. It had drifted:
written during the conversion of cart almanac because the cart agreement says a
round emits the artifact and the declines, and made a separate file without
checking against .loom/published/recording-decisions.md, published in this
repository an hour later, which says declines belong in the event log.
A decline is a decision — what you considered and did not do, with the belief
that could later be shown wrong. Splitting them loses the ordering between what
we did and what we did not, and makes a reader know to look in two places.
The seven declines from almanac are now entries, followed by an entry recording
the fix and its general form: a second file for a special case of something that
already has a home is drift, and it is easiest to catch by reading your own
published rules back.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Depended on by the conventions built on this, and depending on none of them.
- the .loom directory — everything lives there, a directory means a kind, a
stream is a file. Fixes .loom/ and deliberately not which kinds exist.
- sibling facets — x.<facet>.md beside x.md, owned by whoever wrote the facet,
never by whoever wrote x.md. Plus the three choices a convention must make.
- recording decisions — what an entry says, why it is never revised, and why it
has no status field.
- publication — the act, the contract, and that what is published is a document.
Also carries the event log and declines from cart `almanac`, which ran 2026-09-04
to 2026-09-07 and produced seventy-eight entries. Read it forwards; entry 69 is
where it changes its own mind and brackets most of what came before.
The git history here starts now. The event log is the history that matters.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
jeffryandClaude Opus 5