Changelog
A chronological record of all semantic anchors added to the catalog. Community contributors are credited with thanks.
2026-07-24
Fix — the German Contributing page was rendered from an orphaned source:
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The
/de/contributingpage was built fromwebsite/public/CONTRIBUTING.de.adoc, but every contributor edit since #603 went intodocs/CONTRIBUTING.de.adoc— the file that sits next to its English sibling and looks maintained. Nothing rendered it. German readers therefore never saw the artifact taxonomy (#585), the Viability Test (#640), the ADR-008 topic-neutral gate, the issue-title convention (#564), or the developer setup, PR review policy and Criticism/Current-Status rules added in #695.render-docs.jsnow rendersdocs/CONTRIBUTING.de.adoc, and the stale copy underwebsite/public/is deleted, so there is one German source again. Also fixed five relativelink:targets in both Contributing files (ADR-007, ADR-008,docs/roles/) that resolved against the served route and 404’d — they now point at absolute GitHub URLs, which work on the website and in GitHub’s rendered view alike.
New anchor — DMAIC (#696), completing the Six Sigma cluster:
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DMAIC (Bill Smith, Motorola 1986; popularised by GE under Jack Welch from 1995) — problem-solving + statistical-methods: the five gated phases Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control. The anchor’s utility is structural, not descriptive: naming it forces a baseline before any improvement is proposed, separates validated root causes from solutioning, and adds a Control phase that most improvement approaches simply lack. It closes a hole in the catalog — SPC, Control Chart and Nelson Rules all referenced DMAIC as the cycle they serve, without it existing as an anchor. Tier ★★★, confirmed on a weak local model (qwen3.6-27b named all five phases unprompted), bilingual, with a fetch-verified Criticism section (Juran: "there is nothing new there"; the 3M/McNerney case where it stifled research; >60% project failure rate per the WSJ; Wheeler on the 1.5-sigma shift) and a Current Status noting ISO 13053-1:2011 and Lean Six Sigma. Proposed by @Advisior in #696.
New anchor — Residuality Theory (#693):
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Residuality Theory (Barry M. O’Reilly) — software-architecture: start from a deliberately inadequate naive architecture, apply stressors (technical, regulatory, competitive, organisational), identify the residue — what survives — and redesign so failure happens in a controlled way; contagion analysis then surfaces the coupling that otherwise only appears in production. The anchor inverts the design question from "what do we extract first?" to "what survives every stressor?", which is why it is not a reframing of Strangler Fig. Tier ★★☆ — the qualified form ("apply Residuality Theory: run a stressor analysis") is needed, because weaker models dilute the specific vocabulary into generic complexity-science terms. Bilingual, with a fetch-verified Criticism section (the author’s own "case studies is marketing rather than science"; a learning curve he compares to learning OOP; single-originator evidence base) and a Current Status listing the three Procedia Computer Science papers (2020–2022) and the 2024 Springer chapter. Proposed by @dennissterzenbach in #693, reviewed by @JensGrote.
2026-07-08
Fix — EN/DE metadata parity:
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A parity audit found 121 metadata drifts between anchors' English and German files:
:tier:was missing from ~90 German files, the GoF-pattern and SOLID German files carried tiers inconsistent with their English source (EN 3 vs DE 1/2), and several narrative anchors (three-act-structure, hero’s-journey, save-the-cat, …) had:related:/:tags:only in English;problem-space-nvc.dewas also missing a category and a role. Synced all identifier/number metadata (:categories:,:roles:,:tier:,:related:,:tags:) from the authoritative English files to their German counterparts across 100 files. Two:proponents:fields keep their localized German phrasing, by design.
2026-07-07
Fix — dead :related: links:
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Repointed pre-existing broken cross-references to their real anchor IDs:
kiss-principle/yagni→dry(wasdry-principle),yagni→ssot-principle(wasspot-principle),effective-go→effective-java(wasclean-code). All:related:targets across the catalog now resolve to existing anchors.
Metadata audit — :related: backfill (#668, Phase C — audit complete):
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Added curated
:related:cross-links to 70 anchors (EN + DE) that lacked them — 2–5 genuinely related anchors each, using category and tag overlap as candidates and hand-curating to real conceptual connections (the SOLID and GoF-pattern clusters, the personality models, the TDD schools, the SPC trio, and so on). 187/188 anchors now carry:related:(the meta-anchorwhat-qualifies-as-a-semantic-anchoris intentionally standalone). This closes the #668 metadata audit: Phase A (:proponents:), Phase B (:tags:), Phase C (:related:) — the catalog’s required and recommended metadata is now complete.
Metadata audit — :tags: backfill (#668, Phase B):
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Completes
:tags:for the whole catalog — 100% of anchors now carry search keywords. Added tags to 39 anchors that lacked them (EN + DE), derived from each concept’s name, aliases, key sub-concepts and proponents (e.g.arc42→ arc42, architecture documentation, Starke, Hruschka). Follows the Phase A:proponents:backfill; Phase C (:related:) is the remaining follow-up.
New anchor — DISC (#671), the last of the personality cluster:
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DISC Model (William Moulton Marston, 1928) — communication-presentation: four behavioural styles (Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, Conscientiousness) as a lightweight communication-style shorthand. Like MBTI, DISC passes the ADR-008 Utility Gate — naming it reliably imposes the four-quadrant frame on output — so it is admitted, at tier ★☆☆ with an
:advisory:flag (#624) and a fetch-verified Criticism section (classified as pseudoscience; no demonstrated predictive validity; the apparent accuracy is partly the Barnum effect; DISC data are better explained as Big Five combinations). Bilingual, cross-linked with MBTI, Big Five, and HEXACO. Proposed by @rdmueller in #671. This completes the personality-model cluster under ADR-008.
2026-07-06
MBTI held to the ADR-008 Utility Gate:
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Applying ADR-008 to the existing MBTI anchor, without grandfathering. MBTI passes the gate — naming it reliably imposes the 16-type / four-dichotomy structure on output, which is genuine output-structure change, not mere recognition — so it stays. But its criticism did not meet the #603 convention: it now carries a proper fetch-verified
== Criticismsection (Pittenger — 39–76% receive a different type on a five-week retest; widely regarded as pseudoscience) and a== Current Status, plus an:advisory:flag (#624) and:related:links to the empirically validated Big Five and HEXACO. The gate keeps its teeth: MBTI clears it on utility while being held to the same criticism standard as new anchors.
New anchor — HEXACO (#674):
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HEXACO (Kibeom Lee & Michael C. Ashton) — communication-presentation: the six-factor personality model — Big Five plus Honesty-Humility, the strongest trait predictor of unethical/exploitative behaviour and the Dark Triad. Admitted under ADR-008 because that sixth factor delivers distinct utility the Big Five cannot (the redundancy test, not a synonym). Tier ★★☆ (fires with the qualified form "assess along HEXACO, especially Honesty-Humility"), bilingual, with a fetch-verified Criticism section (De Raad et al. — the sixth factor does not always replicate cross-culturally) and a Current Status referencing the Big Five. Proposed by @raifdmueller in #674.
New anchor — Big Five / OCEAN (#673), the first admitted under ADR-008:
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Big Five / OCEAN (Lewis R. Goldberg; Paul T. Costa & Robert R. McCrae) — communication-presentation: five continuous trait dimensions (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism), the empirically dominant trait model and the scientific benchmark against MBTI/DISC. Added as the first anchor to clear the new Utility Gate: tier ★★☆ (fires with the qualified form "profile along the OCEAN dimensions"), bilingual, with a fetch-verified Criticism section (Gurven et al. 2013 — the structure failed to replicate among the Tsimane; the evidence base is heavily WEIRD) and a Current Status pointing to the HEXACO challenger. Proposed by @raifdmueller in #673.
ADR-008 — Personality & assessment frameworks as anchors (the Utility Gate):
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The catalog held one personality anchor (MBTI) while the proposal template rejected "personality/assessment frameworks" — a contradiction that recurred with each new proposal (DISC #671, Big Five/OCEAN #673, HEXACO #674). ADR-008 resolves it with a topic-neutral Utility Gate: no subject area is banned or blessed; a framework is admitted only if naming it demonstrably changes the LLM’s output structure (the existing Viability Test), and carries a Criticism section. MBTI is re-subjected to the same test rather than grandfathered. CONTRIBUTING (EN + DE) and the proposal template are updated to state the topic-neutral rule; the arc42 Chapter 9 ADR index lists ADR-008.
2026-07-05
Metadata audit — :proponents: backfill (#668, Phase A):
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:proponents:is a required attribute, yet a catalog-wide audit found it missing in many anchors. This completes:proponents:for the whole catalog — now 100% of anchors carry the required field. 22 anchors were newly attributed to a clear, canonical originator (EN + DE) — e.g. Clean Architecture (Robert C. Martin), Domain-Driven Design (Eric Evans), Hexagonal Architecture (Alistair Cockburn), Wardley Mapping (Simon Wardley), Pyramid Principle (Barbara Minto) — and 11 German files were brought in sync with their English source. Two anchors gained an institutional/project attribution (devils-advocate→ the Roman Catholic Church’s advocatus diaboli; the meta-anchorwhat-qualifies-as-a-semantic-anchor→ the project itself). For established terms of art with no single originator (sota,ssot-principle), CONTRIBUTING now defines aCommunitysentinel — a missing proponent is treated as a signal to recheck whether the term is truly a semantic anchor. Names only; no invented dates. Phases B (:tags:) and C (:related:) follow.
2026-07-03
LinkedIn preview robustness:
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The
og:imagetag now also carries thename="image"attribute (<meta name="image" property="og:image" …>), a form LinkedIn’s scraper reads more reliably. The image, filenames and other tags were already correct (see 2026-07-02); this only hardens how strict scrapers pick it up.
2026-07-02
Social-media preview image (Open Graph / Twitter card):
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Sharing the site on LinkedIn, X, Slack and the like showed no preview — the
og:imageandtwitter:imagemeta tags pointed atog-image.png/twitter-card.png, which never existed (404). Both files are now shipped: a 1200×630 branded card (dark theme, anchor mark, "Shared vocabulary for precise communication with LLMs"). No HTML change was needed; the tags already referenced the correct names.
2026-07-01
Six new anchors:
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Deep Modules (John Ousterhout, A Philosophy of Software Design) — design-principles: a deep module hides a powerful implementation behind a simple interface. Proposed by @rdmueller in #660.
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Test Seam (Michael Feathers, Working Effectively with Legacy Code) — testing-quality: a place to alter behaviour without editing there, to get legacy code under test. Proposed by @rdmueller in #661.
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Progressive Disclosure (Jack Carroll; Jakob Nielsen / NN/g) — communication-presentation: show the common few first, reveal the rest on demand. Proposed by @rdmueller in #662.
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Zone of Proximal Development (Lev Vygotsky) — communication-presentation: the gap between solo and guided performance, and scaffolding within it. Proposed by @rdmueller in #663.
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Sender-Receiver Discrepancy — communication-presentation: the cause-agnostic umbrella over communication-gap models (meaning is reconstructed by the receiver). Proposed by @rehsack in #639.
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50/72 Rule (Tim Pope) — development-workflow: 50-char subject, 72-char body wrap for readable Git commits. Proposed by @steffakasid in #620.
All ship bilingual (EN/DE) with proponents, "when to use", related anchors, and — where documented — Criticism / Current Status sections with fetch-verified sources. New contract — Presentation Planning (Präsentation planen):
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A new
presentation-planningcontract (category Communication, EN + DE) bundles known anchors into a plan-a-talk workflow: Socratic Method to elicit the brief, Curse of Knowledge for audience empathy, Pyramid Principle + MECE for top-down structure, Three-Act Structure / Story Circle for the narrative arc, 4MAT for why-first, and BLUF for the opening. It produces a plan (core message, audience, arc, per-section takeaways) rather than slides, and works one step at a time. It deliberately excludes delivery/stagecraft — no established anchor covers it yet. Proposed by @raifdmueller.
2026-06-27
"New" badge on recently-added anchors (#652):
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Anchors added in the last 30 days now show a green New badge on their card, so returning visitors can spot fresh entries at a glance. The "added" date is derived from each anchor file’s first git commit at build time (no manual upkeep) and stored as
addedAt; the badge is computed at render time against the current date, so it expires on its own. Bilingual ("New" / "Neu"). The deploy workflow now checks out full history (fetch-depth: 0) so the dates are available in CI.
Direct-answer blocks for AI/LLM citability (#580):
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A GEO audit found the site ranks #1-3 in traditional search yet gets zero citations from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot for "What is Semantic Anchors?". The fix: every anchor’s pre-rendered page now carries a concise, standalone direct-answer block that AI crawlers (which mostly do not run JS) can quote verbatim, and the home page gains a crawlable "What is Semantic Anchors?" answer section (EN + DE). A shared resolver prefers a curated
:definition:attribute and otherwise derives one from the first Core Concept, so the answer block, the modal lead-in, and the DefinedTerm JSON-LD description all agree. Curated definitions seeded for 11 high-value anchors (MECE, BLUF, arc42, Clean Architecture, TDD London School, Gherkin, SOLID, Cynefin, Socratic Method, Chain of Thought, DDD); the rest use the derived fallback until curated. Proposed by @raifdmueller in #580.
Onboarding skill repositioned to a Semantic Contracts installer (#521, #515):
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The
semantic-anchor-onboardingskill installed a list of anchors the model mostly already knows. It is renamed and repositioned assemantic-contracts-installer: its default mode now installs Semantic Contracts — the compositions and rendered templates the model cannot guess (e.g. "Specification" = Cockburn use cases + Gherkin + EARS) — reading a bundleddata/contracts.jsonsnapshot (refreshable viascripts/refresh-contracts.sh). The former anchor-block flow stays as an--anchors-onlysub-mode. The old skill name remains for one release as a deprecation alias that forwards to the new one and idempotently overwrites blocks it previously installed (same markers). The plugin is bumped to v0.6.0. -
SessionStart hook fixed (#515): the installer no longer installs a Claude hook for
CLAUDE.md(Claude Code loads it natively, so the hook double-loaded the block), and the hook is registered with matcherstartuponly — no more noisy re-injection on every resume.
Counter-consensus framing — advisory flag + rejection category (#624):
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Some terms activate reliably yet prime a framing their own field cautions against (e.g. the Eisenhower Matrix and the "mere-urgency effect"). Two new handling paths: a hard rejection category Counter-consensus framing in
rejected-proposals.adoc(which requires a cited consensus source from the framework’s own field), and — for terms worth keeping — an optional:advisory:anchor attribute that renders as a visible amber badge on the card and a banner in the modal, with the detail and source staying in the anchor’s Criticism / Current Status section (single source of truth). The Eisenhower Matrix is the seed: it gains an:advisory:flag and a== Current Statussection. Proposed by @rehsack in #624.
Viability test for anchor proposals — recognition ≠ activation (#640):
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Contribution guidance now tests not just whether a model recognizes a term but whether naming it changes the output. A new "Viability Test" section in
CONTRIBUTING.adoc/CONTRIBUTING.de.adocadds a before/after test, a substitution check (silent substitution / confabulation on weaker models), and a cross-model check;propose-anchor.ymlgains an optional viability-test field. A term that passes the four quality criteria but fails viability belongs in a Contract, not an anchor — the destination the taxonomy (#585) defines. Proposed by @JensGrote in #640. -
The "Not in training data" rejection category was sharpened and renamed Insufficient training-data density, distinguishing recognition from activation and pointing thin-prior terms at a Semantic Contract.
CI now runs the unit tests:
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The Vitest unit suites (the
websiteapp’s 100+ component/util tests and thescriptsmetadata-extraction test) ran nowhere in CI — only lint, E2E, Lighthouse and the security audit did. A drifted assertion had silently gone red onmainas a result. A new Unit Tests job intest.ymlruns both suites on every push and PR;scriptsgains Vitest and atestscript so its test is executable in CI.
Architecture Documentation contract split — vocabulary stays, procedure moves to a skill (#529):
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The
architecture-documentationcontract had grown to seven paragraphs — most of it procedure, not vocabulary. It now shrinks to one paragraph of shared vocabulary (arc42; C4 via PlantUML; Nygard ADRs with a 3-point Pugh matrix; six-part Quality Attribute Scenarios). The procedure — scaffolding the arc42 with-help template, the five cross-section traceability rules, the Chapter 11 Risks-vs-Technical-Debt structure, the ADR↔risk-ID wiring, the Chapter 1.2-vs-10 quality-goal marking — moves into a new on-demand arc42-documentation skill (SKILL.md+ a chapter-by-chapter checklist), shipped in the plugin (bumped to v0.5.0) with its own website page. This is the Anchor/Contract/Skill taxonomy (ADR-007, #585) applied to the project’s own artifacts: a contract that drifted into a skill, split back.crosscutting-conceptsis already terse and stays as-is.
Artifact taxonomy formalised — Anchor vs. Contract vs. Skill (#585):
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The three artifact types the catalog ships now have an explicit, written definition instead of an implicitly-reconstructed one. New
ADR-007(Nygard + Pugh, +63 vs. keeping it implicit) defines each type by function, linguistic shape and loading behaviour, plus a discrimination test; the working definitions are mirrored intoCONTRIBUTING.adocandCONTRIBUTING.de.adocso contributors meet them where they look. ADR drafted by @JensGrote in #585. -
Thin-prior rule: a name not dense in training data is not an anchor — if the missing piece is meaning it becomes a Contract (which supplies its own meaning), if it is procedure it becomes a Skill. This reconciles the one point where #585’s draft and the viability proposal (#640) disagreed, and matches the project’s "weak prior → contract" position. The taxonomy unblocks the contract/skill split (#529) and the onboarding-skill pivot (#521).
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The arc42 Chapter 9 ADR index was completed (it had also been missing ADR-006).
Build fix — req42 anchor title (#643):
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The deploy build broke at the metadata step because the
req42anchor’s title equalled its filename id, which the validator treats as "no real title set". Gave it a descriptive title (req42 Requirements Framework), in the same style asarc42 Architecture Documentation.
Dependency security — npm audit (website):
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npm audit fixcleared the three high-severity advisories that were failing the CI security audit (npm audit --audit-level=high): Vite 7.3.2 → 7.3.6 (server.fs.denybypass on Windows alternate paths, plus the bundledlaunch-editorNTLMv2 hash disclosure) and ws (uninitialized memory disclosure, memory-exhaustion DoS). Pure lockfile bumps within the declared^7.3.1range — build and unit tests stay green. -
The four remaining moderate advisories (
js-yaml,uuid) are dev-only transitive dependencies of@lhci/cli(Lighthouse CI) whose only fix is a breaking downgrade to@lhci/cli@0.6.1; they sit below the CI gate and are left in place rather than break the Lighthouse step.
2026-06-26
18 new anchors from the proposal-triage batch (#642):
Architecture & Design
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Circuit Breaker — wraps a protected call in a state machine (Closed/Open/Half-Open) that trips to fail-fast once failures cross a threshold, preventing resource exhaustion and cascading failure (Michael Nygard, Release It!, 2007; Martin Fowler; proposed by @rehsack in #630)
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Strangler Fig — incrementally replaces a legacy system by routing functionality to new code around its edges until the old system can be retired, avoiding a big-bang rewrite (Martin Fowler, 2004; proposed by @rehsack in #631)
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Team Topologies — organises delivery around four team types (Stream-aligned, Enabling, Complicated-Subsystem, Platform) and three interaction modes for fast flow (Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais, 2019; proposed by @rehsack in #632)
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Twelve-Factor App — twelve practices for portable, scalable SaaS (explicit dependencies, config in the environment, stateless processes, disposability) (Adam Wiggins, Heroku, 2011; proposed by @mc2259 in #622)
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Separation of Concerns — study and change each distinct aspect of a system in isolation, so one can be reasoned about without interference from the others (Edsger W. Dijkstra, 1974; proposed by @rehsack in #627)
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Unix Philosophy — make each program do one thing well and compose small sharp tools via pipes (Doug McIlroy, 1978; Eric S. Raymond, The Art of Unix Programming, 2003; proposed by @rehsack in #628)
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Design by Contract — specify routines with preconditions (caller’s obligation), postconditions (supplier’s guarantee) and invariants, assigning blame precisely when a contract is violated (Bertrand Meyer, Eiffel, 1986; proposed by @rehsack in #633)
Strategy, Problem-Solving & Requirements
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OKR (Objectives and Key Results) — couples a qualitative Objective with a few measurable Key Results to focus and align goals (Andy Grove at Intel; popularised by John Doerr, Measure What Matters, 2018; proposed by @rehsack in #635)
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Fermi Estimation — decompose an unknown quantity into estimable sub-quantities and reason in powers of ten to land the right order of magnitude (Enrico Fermi; proposed by Ralf D. Müller in #608)
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Eisenhower Matrix — plots tasks on urgency × importance to separate the two and prioritise accordingly; admitted deliberately with a fetch-verified Criticism section (mere-urgency effect; Covey’s own caution) (Dwight D. Eisenhower; popularised by Stephen Covey; proposed by @rehsack in #623)
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Laddering (Interview Technique) — reconstructs the means-end chain attribute → consequence → value through repeated "why is that important to you?" probing (George Kelly; Hinkle; Reynolds & Gutman; proposed by @rehsack in #634)
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Consent vs. Consensus — distinguishes decision by absence of a reasoned objection ("good enough for now, safe enough to try") from decision by everyone’s active agreement (Gerard Endenburg, Sociocracy; Brian Robertson, Holacracy; proposed by @fdesoye in #626)
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req42 — the pragmatic, agile requirements framework structured as twelve "drawers" mirroring arc42; the requirements companion to arc42 (Peter Hruschka & Markus Meuten; proposed by @rehsack in #625)
Communication & Learning
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Curse of Knowledge — once you know something you cannot reconstruct not knowing it, so experts overestimate shared context (Camerer, Loewenstein & Weber, 1989; popularised by Chip & Dan Heath; proposed by @rehsack in #638)
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Four-Sides Model (Schulz von Thun) — every message carries four sides at once — fact, self-revelation, relationship, appeal — and is heard with four matching "ears" (Friedemann Schulz von Thun, 1981; proposed by @rehsack in #636)
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Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition — five stages from Novice to Expert describing how rule-following gives way to intuitive, context-driven mastery (Stuart & Hubert Dreyfus, 1980; proposed by @rehsack in #637)
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Effective Java — Joshua Bloch’s catalogue of ~90 concrete best-practice "Items" for idiomatic, robust Java (Joshua Bloch, 3rd ed. 2018; proposed by @schtiefl in #618)
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ADDIE Model — the instructional-design process of Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, Evaluation (Florida State University origin; codified by Robert Maribe Branch, 2009; proposed by @davidlohner in #621)
A new Knowledge Management catalog section was added to house Dreyfus & ADDIE.
2026-06-14
Explaining and Teaching contract — persist the checklist:
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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.mdleakage — 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.
2026-06-12
Search UX (#615):
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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.
Direct links to contracts (#611):
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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
/contractslink 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
DefinedTermentities in the site’s structured data alongside the anchors — each citable by search engines and retrieval-grounded AI under its own URL.
Socratic Code-Theory Recovery skill v0.3 (#531, #532):
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Per-context output files (#531) — Phase 1 now writes
QUESTION_TREE-<context>.adocandOPEN_QUESTIONS-<context>.adocinstead 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.
2026-06-11
Current Status sections, batch 4 — triage complete (#603):
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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).
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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.
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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.
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The About page now states the lexicon positioning: inclusion means precision, not endorsement.
Criticism sections, batch 3 (#603):
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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!").
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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.
Current Status sections, batch 2 (#603):
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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.
Criticism sections, batch 1 (#603):
-
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.
Share metadata & descriptions (#601):
-
Per-page Open Graph / Twitter cards — every pre-rendered page now carries its own
og:url,og:title,og:descriptionandtwitter:*tags (previously all subpages shipped the home-page values, so sharing an anchor link rendered the generic home preview). German pages getog: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.
2026-06-10
Real anchor pages (#597):
-
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, withhreflangpairs. The static home catalog now links to these pages directly.
The website now works without JavaScript (#595):
-
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 honesthreflangpairs (the previous?lang=dealternate served identical English HTML). A/deURL switches the SPA to German for JS users. -
The legacy
#/routehash links in the JS header/footer were replaced with the same clean URLs.
Discoverability (SEO / AI):
-
Structured data — added a standalone
Organizationentity and aDefinedTermSetwith aDefinedTermfor every anchor (name, canonical URL, and a definition where available), generated at build time fromanchors.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).
2026-06-09
New contracts:
-
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
Updated article:
-
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.
2026-06-08
Refined contracts:
-
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
New article:
2026-06-03
New anchors:
-
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)
New contracts:
-
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)
2026-06-02
New anchors:
-
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)
New contracts:
-
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
2026-06-01
New anchors:
-
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)
2026-05-22
New anchors:
-
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)
Contract updates:
-
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.
2026-05-21
Contract updates:
-
Architecture Documentation — sharpened with cross-section traceability and arc42 chapter-level rules. The contract now directs scaffolding the arc42 "with-help" template via docToolchain
downloadTemplateinstead 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)
Skill updates:
-
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:lineevidence, 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)
2026-05-13
New anchors:
-
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)
2026-05-08
New anchors:
-
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)
2026-05-07
New anchors:
-
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)
2026-05-03
Workflow improvements:
-
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.
2026-05-02
New anchors:
-
Cockburn Use Cases — Alistair Cockburn’s structured textual use case format with Goal Levels (Summary, User Goal, Subfunction) and Actor-Goal List discovery technique
New contracts:
-
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)
2026-04-20
New anchors:
-
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
2026-04-15
New anchors (proposed by Ralf D. Müller in #436):
-
Lehman’s Software Classification — Meir M. Lehman’s S-/P-/E-type taxonomy and Laws of Software Evolution
2026-04-12
New anchors:
-
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)
2026-04-07
New anchors (proposed by Gernot Starke):
-
Cohesion Criteria (Constantine & Yourdon) — Seven levels of module cohesion from coincidental to functional
2026-04-01
New anchors:
-
Effective Go — The Go Authors' canonical guide to idiomatic Go
2026-03-29
New category: Creative Writing & Storytelling
-
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)
2026-03-26
New anchors:
-
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
New features:
-
Semantic Contracts — composable project conventions that reference existing anchors. Select and download as
semantic-contracts.mdfor AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md. -
Anchor Evaluations — multiple-choice evaluation framework testing 63 anchors across 10 LLMs. View results.
2026-03-14 — Catalog Curation
Quality review of all anchors: introduced a three-tier rating system (★★★ self-standing, ★★☆ needs qualification, ★☆☆ descriptive only) to measure how reliably an anchor improves LLM communication. All anchors now carry an internal :tier: attribute.
Removed:
-
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
Renamed & upgraded:
-
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
New quality criteria for proposals:
-
Review agent now evaluates anchors against the tier system
-
★☆☆ proposals are rejected unless a concrete prompt pattern is demonstrated
2026-03-09
-
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!
-
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!
2026-03-06
-
ATAM — proposed by @rdmueller in #133
-
LASR — proposed by @rdmueller in #135
2026-03-04
-
OWASP Top 10 — proposed by @Advisior in #130. Thank you!
2026-03-01
-
GoM (Grundsätze ordnungsmäßiger Modellierung) — proposed by @raifdmueller in #126
2026-02-23
-
Regulated Environment — proposed by @bit-jkraushaar in #120. Thank you!
2026-02-22
-
MoSCoW — proposed by @rdmueller in #115
2026-02-17
-
Chatham House Rule — proposed by @rdmueller in #101
2026-02-16
-
Fowler Patterns (PEAA) — proposed by @rdmueller in #99
2026-02-13
-
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)
2026-02-12
-
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
2026-02-07
-
MECE Principle — proposed by @ingo-eichhorst in #26. Thank you!
2026-02-05
-
Nelson Rules — proposed by @rdmueller in #20
-
Control Chart (Shewhart) — proposed by @rdmueller in #21
-
SPC — proposed by @rdmueller in #22
2026-02-03
-
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
2026-01-21
-
Pyramid Principle — proposed by @rdmueller in #12
2025-11-18
-
Mutation Testing — contributed by ThomasPeuss. Thank you!
2025-11-13
-
BEM Methodology — contributed by Robert Nimax. Thank you!
2025-11-11
-
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!
2025-11-10 — Initial Catalog
First commit by @rdmueller with 23 founding anchors:
Community Contributors
Thank you to everyone who has contributed anchors to the catalog!
| Contributor | Contributions |
|---|---|
Conventional Commits, Semantic Versioning, TIMTOWTDI |
|
SOLID Principles, Regulated Environment |
|
Robert Nimax |
BEM Methodology |
ThomasPeuss |
Mutation Testing |
MECE Principle |
|
OWASP Top 10 |
|
CQRS, GoF Design Patterns, Test Double (Meszaros), Event-Driven Architecture, BDD, YAGNI |
|
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) |