feat(writing-for-agents): add the cache leading word for environment truth

Single source of truth now reaches past the document into the environment.
package.json scripts, config files, directory layout and --help output are
authoritative already, so a doc restating them is a cache of a lookup that
earns its load only when the lookup is expensive.

Co-authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
Matt Pocock
2026-07-28 12:16:51 +01:00
co-authored by Claude Opus 5
parent 6e742d6441
commit d4e8664be2
3 changed files with 7 additions and 1 deletions
+1 -1
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@@ -35,7 +35,7 @@ Once you're thinking in these two loads, most authoring decisions — split or d
- **Information hierarchy** — the ladder from in-file step, to in-file reference, to disclosed reference behind a pointer. **Progressive disclosure** is the move down that ladder so the top stays legible; **co-location** decides what sits beside each piece once placed.
- **Completion criteria** — the clarity and demand of each step's done-condition, and the **legwork** it drives; the defence against **premature completion**.
- **Leading words** — a compact concept already in the model's pretraining (*tight*, *red*, *tracer bullet*) that the agent thinks with while running the document; hunt restatements a single word can retire.
- **Pruning** — single source of truth, relevance, and the no-op test applied sentence by sentence, against **sediment** and **sprawl**.
- **Pruning** — single source of truth, relevance, and the no-op test applied sentence by sentence, against **sediment** and **sprawl**. Single source of truth reaches past the document into the environment: a doc restating what's already in `package.json`, a config file, or `--help` output is a **cache** of a lookup that was never expensive, and it's the copy that goes stale. Cache what the agent can't find by looking — the unwritten convention, the reason behind a choice.
## Where it fits