§ 02 / Principles

Eight principles

Durable design choices that recur across every working KMS I’ve built or studied. Each principle is illustrated in Claude primitives.

  1. 01Route, Don't OrganizeThe system auto-routes based on what something is. Users never file.
  2. 02Separate State, Knowledge, and InterfaceThree layers (plus a warehouse at team scale). Each evolves on its own clock.
  3. 03Automatic Compilation Over Manual CurationLLMs compile raw material continuously. Curation is the rare exception, not the default.
  4. 04Bouncer-Promoter Quality GateTwo-pass filter — first decide if it belongs at all, then decide where it goes.
  5. 05Design for NeglectSurvives weeks of silence. Degrades gracefully. Never guilt-trips the user back.
  6. 06Entity Context PatternStructured facts about real things, not flat key-value notes.
  7. 07Continuous Ripple & Contradiction DetectionEvery ingest propagates. Tensions surface for resolution.
  8. 08Hybrid AuthorshipSome content is human-authored, some is LLM-compiled. The split is deliberate, marked, and the line between them shifts by tier.