jeffryandClaude Opus 5
f026f3ea55
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>
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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.
.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
— 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.