Changelog

The Explaining and Teaching contract now adds a single clause (EN + DE): for a long or multi-session explanation, persist the running understanding-checklist as a file so it survives context loss and can be resumed. An empirical A/B run — our contract versus the source prompt it was distilled from, both driven headless in a clean room with no CLAUDE.md leakage — showed the source prompt’s one genuine advantage was the durable checklist file it wrote to disk; everything else (honoring opt-out, one step per turn, not announcing the method) our contract already did better. This closes that gap without sacrificing the scale-to-the-question behaviour.

Search results were invisible: typing in the search box filtered the catalog grid, but the hero section above it pushed the results below the fold. An active search now collapses the hero with a smooth 300ms animation (it slides back the moment the query is cleared), so results appear directly under the header. Honors prefers-reduced-motion.

Search controls only where they work: the header search box, role filter, and anchor counter used to appear on every page while being dead outside the home catalog (no grid to filter, the counter stuck at "0 / 0"). The whole control row is now shown only on the home route.

Every semantic contract now has its own pre-rendered page at /contract/<id>, with a German variant at /de/contract/<id> — own title, description, canonical URL, social-share metadata, and hreflang pairs, exactly like the anchor pages from #597. Sharing a single contract (e.g. Specification) now produces the right preview instead of the generic contracts-page card.

The cards on /contracts link to their detail pages; in the SPA, a /contract/<id> URL opens the contracts page scrolled to the highlighted card with the real contract title in the tab.

All 38 contract pages joined the sitemap, and contracts are now DefinedTerm entities in the site’s structured data alongside the anchors — each citable by search engines and retrieval-grounded AI under its own URL.

Per-context output files (#531) — Phase 1 now writes QUESTION_TREE-<context>.adoc and OPEN_QUESTIONS-<context>.adoc instead of fixed filenames, so the documented "one bounded context at a time" workflow no longer silently overwrites earlier runs; Phase 2 reads the context-specific tree, and ADRs get a context prefix (adrs/<context>-adr-NNN-*.adoc) so two contexts cannot clobber each other’s decision records.

Fixed Q3.2 constraints sub-level (#532) — the Architecture Constraints node now always emits Q3.2.1 technical, Q3.2.2 organizational/process, and Q3.2.3 conventional constraints, mirroring arc42 Chapter 2’s constraint kinds; for this branch the prompt explicitly admits non-code evidence (CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md, CONTRIBUTING, CI workflows, linter configs), closing the gap where process and convention constraints surfaced untraceably in Phase 2 output.

The remaining 14 versioned/living anchors now carry a Current Status section (EN + DE), all facts fetch-verified: arc42 (v9.0, July 2025, Section-10 split), C4 (levels stable, site rewritten 09/2024), Diátaxis (core stable, site grown), GitHub Flow (Chacon’s 2011 continuous-deployment original vs GitHub’s deploy-free current docs), PEAA (catalog unchanged since 2003, eaaDev frozen since 2006), BEM (definition stable, practice moved to utility-first — State of CSS no longer tracks methodologies), IEC 61508 (Ed 2 still current; Ed 3 forecast ~10/2026), LINDDUN (now a GO/PRO/MAESTRO family; no "MAID"), SRE (books canonical; platform-engineering convergence), SOTA (Papers with Code — the canonical tracker — no longer exists), Chain of Thought (reasoning models internalise it; OpenAI advises against "think step by step"), LLM-Evaluations (MMLU already superseded), Fagan Inspection and CRC Cards (definitions intact, practice moved on).

The five thin-prior anchors (GoM, IOSP, Meaningful Human Control, todo.txt-flavoured Markdown, LASR) get verified canonical sources plus explicit supply-the-definition advice.

LASR rewritten: verification revealed the previous entry was a silent substitution — it described a fabricated "lightweight architecture documentation template" with an invented acronym expansion (and the AgentSkill catalog carried a second, different invented expansion). The real LASR is the Lightweight Approach for Software Reviews (Toth & Zörner, lasr-reviews.org, "Reviewing Software Systems", Leanpub 2023), a streamlined ATAM alternative. The corrected anchor documents its own failure case as evidence for the thin-prior warning.

The About page now states the lexicon positioning: inclusion means precision, not endorsement.

The remaining twelve contested anchors from the catalog triage now carry a Criticism section (EN + DE), every claim with a named critic and a fetch-verified linked source: 4MAT (learning-styles evidence — Pashler et al. 2008, Kirschner 2017), AIDA (hierarchy-of-effects critique — Heath & Feldwick 2008, Vakratsas & Ambler 1999), Clean Architecture (indirection tax — Bogard, Comartin; alternative: Vertical Slice Architecture), CQRS (author-acknowledged overuse — Fowler, Dahan, Young), DRY (the authors' own "we did a poor job of explaining" concession plus Sandi Metz), Freytag’s Pyramid (Jane Alison), GoF Design Patterns (Norvig’s 16-of-23, Paul Graham’s human compiler), Hero’s Journey (folklorists Dundes and Toelken), Jobs To Be Done (the Christensen-vs-Ulwick two-schools problem), Kotter’s 8 Steps (no empirical validation of the whole model — Appelbaum et al. 2012; Kotter’s own Accelerate revision), MVP (term dilution — NN/g; Kniberg’s skateboard corrective), and Save the Cat (Suderman’s "Save the Movie!").

With batch 3, all 23 Criticism candidates and the 6 highest-drift Current Status candidates from the #603 triage are done — 28 anchors carry sourced sections.

The six anchors whose referent has editions or successors now carry a Current Status section (EN + DE) naming what is current, which edition an LLM’s training-data prior most plausibly serves, and how to disambiguate in prompts — every claim fetch-verified by research agents: OWASP Top 10 (2025 edition is current; bare category IDs are ambiguous — A03 means Injection in 2021 but Software Supply Chain Failures in 2025), ISO/IEC 25010 (2023 revision: nine characteristics, Safety added; prior serves the withdrawn 2011 model), MADR (4.0.0; prior reproduces the 2.x-era template), Effective Go (deliberately frozen by the Go team since 2009, predates generics and modules), Bloom’s Taxonomy (1956 nouns vs 2001 verbs — priors blend both), and Cockburn Use Cases (Use-Case 2.0 is an anchor of its own; the official Use Case 3.0 ebook exists since 2024 but its prior is thin — supply the definition in the prompt).

New contribution convention: every new anchor proposal now includes a criticism / edition-drift research step; findings land in Criticism / Current Status sections with named, fetch-verified linked sources. Documented in CONTRIBUTING (EN + DE) and the anchor template.

Fixed the Wolf Schneider criticism source from batch 1: it now links the concrete Sprachlog post in which Anatol Stefanowitsch calls Schneider the "oberster Sprachnörgler der deutschsprachigen Journaille" (Sprachbrocken 49/2012), instead of a category archive.

The catalog is a lexicon, not a list of endorsements — and a lexicon marks its contested entries. Following a full triage of all 161 anchors (#603), the ten anchors with the most prominent documented critique now carry a Criticism section (EN + DE) citing named, linked sources and the alternatives the discourse proposes: GoF Singleton (Gamma 2009, Hevery 2008), Testing Pyramid (Testing Trophy, Spotify honeycomb), SWOT (Hill & Westbrook 1997), Plain English / Strunk & White (Pullum 2009), Gutes Deutsch / Wolf Schneider (descriptive-linguistics critique), Postel’s Law (Allman 2011, RFC 9413), Red/Green TDD ("Is TDD Dead?" debate, Coplien), CAP Theorem (Brewer 2012, Kleppmann 2015), Five Whys (Card 2017, Allspaw 2014), and SOLID (North’s CUPID, Ousterhout). The MBTI anchor pioneered this format.

Per-page Open Graph / Twitter cards — every pre-rendered page now carries its own og:url, og:title, og:description and twitter:* tags (previously all subpages shipped the home-page values, so sharing an anchor link rendered the generic home preview). German pages get og:locale=de_DE.

Accurate home description — the hard-coded "110+ semantic anchors" claim (real count: 161) is replaced by counts computed from the data files at build time; the static shell texts are now count-free so they cannot go stale.

Normalized snippet lengths — meta descriptions are capped at ~160 characters on a word boundary; very short anchor extracts get the anchor title prefixed.

Every /anchor/<id> URL was an HTTP 404, served only through the JavaScript SPA fallback — while the sitemap and the DefinedTerm structured data advertised all 161 of them. Each anchor is now a real pre-rendered page (own title, description, canonical URL, content expanded), plus a German /de/anchor/<id> variant for the 155 translated anchors, with hreflang pairs. The static home catalog now links to these pages directly.

Static navigation — the HTML shell shipped empty header/footer placeholders and not a single <a href> link, so without JavaScript the site was a dead end for crawlers, LLM fetchers, and no-JS visitors. The shell now carries a real header (logo + nav) and footer with plain clean-URL links; with JavaScript the SPA hydrates on top exactly as before.

Static home catalog — the full category → anchor catalog (161 anchors) is pre-rendered into the home page, each anchor linking to its stable section in the Full Reference (/all-anchors#<anchor-id>).

Static German pages — the home page and every doc page with a German translation are pre-rendered under /de/… with honest hreflang pairs (the previous ?lang=de alternate served identical English HTML). A /de URL switches the SPA to German for JS users.

The legacy #/route hash links in the JS header/footer were replaced with the same clean URLs.

Structured data — added a standalone Organization entity and a DefinedTermSet with a DefinedTerm for every anchor (name, canonical URL, and a definition where available), generated at build time from anchors.json. Lets search engines and retrieval-grounded AI resolve "Semantic Anchors" as a distinct entity and each anchor as a defined term (#579).

Fixed: the An Anchor Delivers Only as Far as the Prior Reaches article was not pre-rendered and was therefore invisible to search engines and LLM crawlers. It is now pre-rendered like every other doc page.

Landing answer block — the home page rendered its hero (the "what are Semantic Anchors?" definition) only client-side, so crawlers and LLM fetchers saw an empty shell. The hero copy is now pre-rendered into the static home page, single-sourced from the translations so it never drifts from the live hero (#580).

Strategic Architecture Analysis — a strategic-analysis recipe that combines four lenses with the questions they answer: Wardley Mapping (how each component evolves), the Cynefin Framework (match the response to the domain), a Morphological Box (explore the option space deliberately instead of anchoring on the first design), ATAM (weigh tradeoffs against the quality goals), and the Five Whys (drill to the root cause); for build-vs-buy decisions, architecture-fitness reviews, and strategic technology-radar reviews

An Anchor Delivers Only as Far as the Prior Reaches — added Fable 5 (Anthropic’s newest model, probed on its release day) as a fourth column in the prior-mapping matrix. It holds the richest Use-Case 2.0 prior of the four models yet still hedges on Use-Case 3.0, strengthening the finding that a dense 2.0 prior does not buy a 3.0 one.

Explaining and Teaching — reworked from a structured "explain in 4MAT order" loop into a question-driven teaching dialogue: open by having the learner restate what they know, then one small step per turn (ask, or explain a little and check, then stop and wait), quiz with multiple-choice questions whose answer is withheld until the learner commits, and don’t advance until they can apply it to a fresh case. The anchors (Socratic Method, 4MAT, Naur, Feynman, Bloom’s, Definition of Done) now shape behaviour as attributions rather than named steps, with an explicit "don’t announce the method" guard so the scaffold no longer leaks into the output. Also keeps the over-fire brake (a one-line question gets a one-line answer) and learner opt-out

An Anchor Delivers Only as Far as the Prior Reaches — how a semantic anchor’s power depends on how densely the concept sits in an LLM’s training data, with a reproducible A–E experiment across Claude Haiku 4.5, Sonnet 4.6 and Opus 4.8. Prompted by @simasch's #582 on the Cockburn Use Cases anchor.

IOSP (Integration Operation Segregation Principle) — a function shall either contain logic (Operation) or call other functions (Integration), but never both; the formal refinement of SRP at function level; separates integration (coordination/sequencing) from operation (business logic/computation); eliminates mock-heavy tests by avoiding new’ing in functions that contain logic; formally checkable via IospAnalyzer (Roslyn); reduces the need for Dependency Injection (DIP) at the function level (Ralf Westphal, 2022; Stefan Lieser, 2025; proposed by @JensGrote in #556)

AIDA Model — the classic copywriting/advertising funnel: Attention → Interest → Desire → Action; a sequential hierarchy-of-effects model that makes persuasive copy do each job in turn (hook, relevance, wanting, call to action) instead of jumping to the ask; pins the canonical four-stage form and notes variants (AIDAS, AIDCA, AIDA-R); fills the persuasion/copywriting gap in the communication cluster (commonly attributed to E. St. Elmo Lewis, 1898)

TDD, Hamburg Style — Ralf Westphal’s design-led TDD recipe: close the requirements/logic gap before writing code via the ACD cycle (Analyze → Design → Code), then test at service boundaries with minimal mocking; composes Red-Green-Refactor, London School, Chicago School, and IOSP (proposed by @kuerm in #557, follows from #458)

DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) — "every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system"; targets duplicated knowledge/intent rather than coincidental textual similarity, with the Rule of Three (Fowler) and the wrong-abstraction caution ("duplication is far cheaper than the wrong abstraction", Sandi Metz) as guardrails; antonym WET (Andy Hunt & Dave Thomas, The Pragmatic Programmer, 1999; proposed by @GaboCapo in #560)

Event Storming according to Alberto Brandolini — a collaborative workshop that models a domain as past-tense domain events on a timeline using a fixed colour notation (orange Event, blue Command, yellow Aggregate, lilac Policy, green Read Model, pink External System, red Hotspot) across three levels (Big Picture, Process Modeling, Design Level); surfaces bounded-context seams via pivotal events and makes assumptions explicit as hotspots; Reverse Event Storming reconstructs legacy systems (Alberto Brandolini, 2012/2013; proposed by @SidekickJohn in #558)

Bloom’s Taxonomy — the six-level hierarchy of cognitive learning objectives (Remember, Understand, Apply, Analyze, Evaluate, Create) with measurable action verbs per level; pins the Revised 2001 version and its knowledge dimension; complements the teaching cluster (4MAT, Feynman, Socratic) by grading the cognitive level a step targets — so "demonstrated understanding" can be set at Apply/Analyze rather than recall (Benjamin Bloom, 1956; Anderson & Krathwohl revision, 2001)

Explaining and Teaching — a gated teaching loop for "explain / why / how" requests: explain and verify understanding. Composes 4MAT (Why→What→How→What-If), Programming as Theory Building (the why behind the design), Socratic Method (diagnose first), Feynman Technique (explain-it-back), Bloom’s Taxonomy (understood = Apply/Analyze, not recall) and Definition of Done (a checklist demonstrated, not nodded at); scales to the size of the question

Meaningful Human Control (MHC) — the requirement that humans keep genuine, substantive control over autonomous systems making high-stakes decisions, rather than formulaic "human-in-the-loop" oversight; demands situational awareness, an identifiable accountability chain that cannot pass to machines, positive human authorization of critical actions, and timely intervention; Sharkey’s five levels (L1 human deliberates → L5 fully autonomous) grade the autonomy; rooted in the autonomous-weapons / international humanitarian law debate (Article 36, 2013) and now underpinning the EU AI Act’s human-oversight rules (proposed by @JensGrote in #543, issue #540)

Conway’s Law — organizations produce designs whose structure mirrors their communication structure; underlies team-topology and module-boundary reasoning and the Inverse Conway Maneuver (Melvin Conway, 1968; #506)

CAP Theorem — a partitioned distributed system must trade Consistency against Availability; reframed by PACELC for the no-partition case (Brewer 2000; Gilbert & Lynch 2002; #508)

Fallacies of Distributed Computing — the eight false network assumptions (reliable, zero latency, infinite bandwidth, secure, fixed topology, one admin, zero transport cost, homogeneous) as an audit checklist for distributed designs (L. P. Deutsch & J. Gosling, Sun; #507)

Law of Demeter — "only talk to your immediate friends"; the Principle of Least Knowledge against train-wreck call chains (Ian Holland & Karl Lieberherr, Northeastern, 1987; #509)

First Principles Thinking — decompose a problem to irreducible truths and reason up, instead of reasoning by analogy (roots in Aristotle/Descartes; #510)

Postel’s Law — the Robustness Principle: "be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept", with the modern strictness/versioning caveat (Jon Postel, RFC 761, 1980; #512)

Goodhart’s Law — "when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"; a critique lens for KPIs and LLM-evaluation criteria (Charles Goodhart 1975; Strathern’s formulation; #513)

Inverted Pyramid Style — the journalistic news structure: most important information first, with a long prunable tail; distinct from BLUF (short) and the Pyramid Principle (complete argument) (proposed by @mhchem in #538)

Quality Attribute Scenario — Bass, Clements & Kazman’s six-part scenario format (SEI, Software Architecture in Practice) that turns a vague quality goal into a testable statement: Source, Stimulus, Artifact, Environment, Response, Response Measure; the Response Measure is what makes it verifiable. The format underlies arc42 Chapter 10 quality requirements and the leaves of an ATAM utility tree.

Luhmann’s System Theory — Niklas Luhmann’s sociological systems theory; autopoiesis, operational closure, structural coupling, double contingency, communication as the operation of social systems; a theory for analysing complex socio-technical systems where boundaries are contested (proposed by @JensGrote in #517)

Simon’s Constructivism — Fritz B. Simon’s introduction to systems theory and constructivism; viability vs. truth, trivial vs. non-trivial machines, second-order cybernetics, perturbation instead of instruction (proposed by @JensGrote in #517)

Systemic Consulting (Heidelberg School) — the Heidelberg School of systemic consulting after Fritz B. Simon; all-partiality, neutrality, circular questions, context clarification, intervention as irritation rather than instruction (proposed by @JensGrote in #517)

Architecture Documentation — now references the Quality Attribute Scenario anchor and requires Chapter 10 quality scenarios to be written in the six-part form with a literal Response Measure.

Architecture Documentation — sharpened with cross-section traceability and arc42 chapter-level rules. The contract now directs scaffolding the arc42 "with-help" template via docToolchain downloadTemplate instead of restating chapter structure; adds five cross-section traceability rules (quality goal → strategy, context ↔ building blocks, building block → runtime, Chapter 9 ADR index, building-block detail); separates Chapter 11 Risks from Technical Debt with probability/impact/priority columns; wires ADR Consequences to Chapter 11 risk IDs; and clarifies that Chapter 1.2 holds the top 3-5 quality goals while Chapter 10 may elaborate further characteristics (#502, #503, #504, #505)

Socratic Code Theory Recovery — the Q4 quality wording now states the Chapter 1.2-vs-10 relationship: Chapter 1.2 names only the top quality goals, Chapter 10 covers all eight characteristics, each marked as concretising a top goal or as derived (#505)

Socratic Code-Theory Recovery skill — Phase 1 decomposition is now adaptive instead of near-fixed: a node is a leaf only when answerable from specific file:line evidence, otherwise it decomposes further (capped at four levels below a fixed node). Tree depth tracks code density, so a large bounded context no longer collapses into one thin leaf per arc42 chapter. Directory-level evidence is no longer valid. The Phase 2 prompt wording was corrected to match the schema — claims trace back to a tree leaf as a build-time check, Q-IDs never appear in the final documents (#522, #524)

Hoshin Kanri — Yoji Akao’s Lean strategy-deployment discipline; 3-5 year True North objectives cascade into annual hoshin via the X-Matrix, with two-way catchball negotiation and monthly Bowling-Chart reviews; deliberately restricted to the few vital goals (proposed by @jaoltr in #468)

Double Diamond — UK Design Council’s design-process model (2005, expanded 2019); two divergent-convergent cycles — Discover/Define (problem space) and Develop/Deliver (solution space); "design the right thing, then design the thing right" (proposed by @jaoltr in #467)

Decisional Balance Sheet — Janis & Mann’s four-cell decision matrix (1977) extending Franklin’s "moral algebra"; surfaces utilitarian and social trade-offs, used in decision coaching and Motivational Interviewing to resolve ambivalence (proposed by @Mabla70 in #448)

Kano Model — Noriaki Kano’s two-dimensional quality model classifying features as Must-be, Performance, Attractive, Indifferent or Reverse, surveyed via paired functional/dysfunctional questions; pairs naturally with MoSCoW for backlog prioritisation (proposed in #459)

Kotter’s 8-Step Change Model — John P. Kotter’s classic transformation framework from Leading Change (HBR 1995, book 1996): urgency, guiding coalition, vision, communication, empowerment, short-term wins, consolidation, anchor in culture; the model is the inversion of the eight common errors that kill transformations (proposed in #460)

XY Problem — Communication anti-pattern from technical-support culture, coined by Mark Jason Dominus (2001) and popularised by Eric S. Raymond ("How To Ask Questions The Smart Way"); the asker requests Y when the real goal is X (proposed by @dernerl in #457)

Specification workflow restructured — Step 4 now builds the spec in layers: Persona Use Cases (Cockburn Fully Dressed, User Goal level), System Use Cases (technical interfaces: API, CLI, events, file formats), and Supplementary Specifications (Entity Model, State Machines, Interface Contracts, Validation Rules). Aligned with Martinelli’s AIUP distinction between Business and System Use Case Specifications.

Cockburn Use Cases — Alistair Cockburn’s structured textual use case format with Goal Levels (Summary, User Goal, Subfunction) and Actor-Goal List discovery technique

Socratic Code Theory Recovery — Recover a program’s "theory" (Naur 1985) from source code through recursive question refinement; composes Socratic Method, arc42, ISO 25010, Nygard ADRs, Mental Model (Naur)

Single Level of Abstraction Principle (SLAP) — Kent Beck’s Composed Method, codified as a Clean Code function-design rule by Robert C. Martin (proposed by @eirikbell in #440)

Occam’s Razor — William of Ockham’s parsimony principle applied to explanations, debugging and architecture rationale (proposed by @danielschmeiss in #439)

Code Smells — Kent Beck / Martin Fowler / Robert C. Martin catalogue of surface indications pointing to deeper design problems (proposed by @ma7tz in #435)

What Would Chuck Norris Do? (WWCND) — Tier 3 disposition-activator for direct commitment under uncertainty; originally rejected in #426, re-proposed by @cornelius in #438 with a 16-page empirical validation (3 models × 19 prompts × N=2 = 114 manually scored responses) that passed all four catalog criteria

Lehman’s Software Classification — Meir M. Lehman’s S-/P-/E-type taxonomy and Laws of Software Evolution

Red/Green TDD — Kent Beck’s classical TDD cycle (proposed by @petehodgson-tribe in #412)

4MAT — Bernice McCarthy’s learning cycle: why → what → how → what if (proposed by @rweisleder in #413)

Walking Skeleton — Alistair Cockburn’s end-to-end production-capable skeleton (proposed by @cpoepke in #420)

Tracer Bullet — Hunt & Thomas’s exploratory end-to-end slice (proposed by @cpoepke in #421)

Thin Vertical Slice — Cockburn & Cohn’s end-to-end delivery technique (proposed by @cpoepke in #422)

Spike Solution — Kent Beck’s time-boxed XP research technique (proposed by @cpoepke in #423)

Minimum Viable Product (MVP) — Eric Ries’s lean-startup hypothesis validation (proposed by @cpoepke in #424)

Cohesion Criteria (Constantine & Yourdon) — Seven levels of module cohesion from coincidental to functional

Effective Go — The Go Authors' canonical guide to idiomatic Go

Three-Act Structure — Aristotle / Syd Field / McKee

Hero’s Journey (Monomyth) — Joseph Campbell / Christopher Vogler

Save the Cat! 15-Beat Sheet — Blake Snyder

Fichtean Curve — John Gardner / Janet Burroway

Freytag’s Pyramid (Five-Act) — Gustav Freytag / John Yorke

Story Circle — Dan Harmon

Kishōtenketsu — Classical Chinese/Japanese tradition

Hemingway Bridge — Tiago Forte’s session re-entry technique (proposed by @arampp in #389)

CRC-Cards — Ward Cunningham & Kent Beck’s collaborative OO design technique (proposed by @arampp in #386)

GRASP — Craig Larman’s 9 OO responsibility-assignment patterns

Vertical Slice Architecture — Jimmy Bogard’s feature-first architecture

KISS Principle — Keep It Simple (Tier 1)

P.A.R.A. Method — Tiago Forte’s knowledge organization framework

PERT — Program Evaluation and Review Technique (Tier 2)

ISO 25010 — Software product quality model

Semantic Contracts — composable project conventions that reference existing anchors. Select and download as semantic-contracts.md for AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md.

Anchor Evaluations — multiple-choice evaluation framework testing 63 anchors across 10 LLMs. View results.

Rubber Duck Debugging — concept is fully covered by Socratic Method; no actionable LLM instruction on its own

DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) — design principle, but "make it DRY" is too vague as an LLM instruction

SPOT (Single Point of Truth) — too similar to SSOT; consolidated into SSOT

Chatham House Rule — well-defined rule, but no practical LLM application

Mental Model (Naur) → Programming as Theory Building (Naur) — sharpened focus on documenting the "why" behind code (★☆☆ → ★★☆)

Problem Space NVC → Nonviolent Communication (Rosenberg) — stronger trigger, clear 4-step process (★★☆ → ★★★)

Test Double (Meszaros) → ★★★ umbrella anchor with 5 new sub-anchors: Dummy, Stub, Spy, Mock, Fake — each a precise, actionable LLM instruction (★☆☆ → ★★★)

Jobs To Be Done — upgraded to ★★★, strong for landing pages and customer analysis

SOTA — upgraded to ★★★, "Recherchiere SOTA zu [Thema]" reliably activates research mode

Review agent now evaluates anchors against the tier system

★☆☆ proposals are rejected unless a concrete prompt pattern is demonstrated

Plain English (Strunk & White) in #177

Gutes Deutsch (Wolf Schneider) in #175

Gherkin in #171

SWOT in #169

GoF Design Patterns Umbrella — 23 GoF patterns as sub-anchors with tier system (12 Tier-1, 7 Tier-2, 4 Tier-3) in #159

SOLID Principles Umbrella — 5 SOLID principles as sub-anchors (SRP, OCP, LSP, ISP, DIP, all Tier-1) in #161

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) — proposed by @gernotstarke in #158. Thank you!

CQRS — contributed by @Nantero1 in #137. Thank you!

GoF Design Patterns — contributed by @Nantero1 in #140. Thank you!

Test Double (Meszaros) — contributed by @Nantero1 in #142. Thank you!

Event-Driven Architecture — contributed by @Nantero1 in #143. Thank you!

BDD (Given-When-Then) — contributed by @Nantero1 in #138, merged via #152. Thank you!

YAGNI — contributed by @Nantero1 in #139, merged via #152. Thank you!

ATAM — proposed by @rdmueller in #133

LASR — proposed by @rdmueller in #135

OWASP Top 10 — proposed by @Advisior in #130. Thank you!

GoM (Grundsätze ordnungsmäßiger Modellierung) — proposed by @raifdmueller in #126

Regulated Environment — proposed by @bit-jkraushaar in #120. Thank you!

MoSCoW — proposed by @rdmueller in #115

Chatham House Rule — proposed by @rdmueller in #101

Fowler Patterns (PEAA) — proposed by @rdmueller in #99

Morphological Box — proposed by @rdmueller in #67

IEC 61508 SIL Levels — proposed by @rdmueller in #67

Split from monolithic README.adoc into individual anchor files (#38)

Socratic Method — proposed by @rdmueller in #31

BLUF — proposed by @rdmueller in #31

Rubber Duck Debugging — proposed by @rdmueller in #31

Chain of Thought — proposed by @rdmueller in #31

Devil’s Advocate — proposed by @rdmueller in #31

Five Whys — proposed by @rdmueller in #31

Feynman Technique — proposed by @rdmueller in #31

MADR — proposed by @raifdmueller in #29

TIMTOWTDI — contributed by @rehsack in #28. Thank you!

MECE Principle — proposed by @ingo-eichhorst in #26. Thank you!

Nelson Rules — proposed by @rdmueller in #20

Control Chart (Shewhart) — proposed by @rdmueller in #21

SPC — proposed by @rdmueller in #22

DRY Principle — added in #19

SPOT Principle — added in #19

SSOT Principle — added in #19

SOTA — proposed by @raifdmueller in #16

todo.txt-flavoured Markdown — proposed by @raifdmueller in #14

Pyramid Principle — proposed by @rdmueller in #12

Mutation Testing — contributed by ThomasPeuss. Thank you!

BEM Methodology — contributed by Robert Nimax. Thank you!

Conventional Commits — contributed by @rehsack in #4. Thank you!

Semantic Versioning — contributed by @rehsack in #4. Thank you!

SOLID Principles — contributed by @bit-jkraushaar. Thank you!

TDD, London School

TDD, Chicago School

Problem Space NVC

Mental Model (Naur)

EARS Requirements

arc42

ADR (Nygard)

Pugh Matrix

C4 Diagrams

Docs-as-Code

Domain-Driven Design

Hexagonal Architecture

Clean Architecture

User Story Mapping

Impact Mapping

Jobs To Be Done

Cynefin Framework

Wardley Mapping

Property-Based Testing

Testing Pyramid

Diátaxis Framework

What Qualifies as a Semantic Anchor