The source documents
This site is written from a commissioning pack, and the pack is published in full — 11 documents, 5,725 words — because a site that argues from a document should let you read the document.
The raw markdown is the source of truth. Each reader page renders its document
from the raw file in briefs/ at load time; if that fails, the page falls back
to a link to the raw file. Nothing is transcribed by hand, so a reader page cannot say
something the document does not.
Every file is fetchable at a stable constructed URL: /briefs/<filename>.
That is a promise, not an accident.
Read them
The brief pack — read me first
What the pack is, what each document does, and the tier accounting: 15 traced, 7 stated, 3 discovered across 25 entries, with the seed JSON declared authoritative and the counts to be regenerated from it.
Read it →00 — The brief
The commission itself. The name decided, the format already invented, the thesis that this is the provenance layer of the memory network, the three-tier map with its evidence, the honest constraints, and the build order this site was written in.
Read it →01 — The register format
The seven blocks, canonised from Dinis Cruz's own Bret Victor register — a format proven in use before it was designed. Plus the three reduced forms (link-out, stub, discovered) and the entry metadata schema.
Read it →02 — The influence map
Every entry with its corpus evidence, quotes and paths. Twelve traced influences with file counts, Dinis Cruz's stated seven with zero grep hits, five discovered by mining — and the composition view showing the influences are a graph, not a list.
Read it →03 — Site architecture
The URL scheme, the data model, the rule that tier movement is the site's changelog, the special role the comms page plays as a briefing-request queue, the infographic rules, and what the site deliberately does not do.
Read it →04 — Boundaries and licensing
The no-verbatim rule as licence armour: link never rehost, short attributed quotation for analysis only, lyrics as the sharpest edge, likenesses as original artwork only, and the split an agent ingesting llms-full.txt inherits.
Read it →05 — Gaps and open questions
Five gaps the pack owns — the missing full register text, the seven evidence-less entries, two decades of unmined publications, the incomplete trace tables, the artwork — and seven questions only Dinis Cruz can answer.
Read it →The immediate-connection register — the structural summary
The model entry, in summary. The anchor, and a description of the register's five patterns, two gap specs, six-point checklist and closing argument. The full text is with Dinis Cruz and is the first ask in the comms queue.
Read it →The pack's licence
CC BY 4.0 on the pack, the seed data and the site's own content — and the explicit list of what it does not cover: every anchor work, which belongs to its author.
Read it →All 11, with their raw files
| Document | Raw file | Words |
|---|---|---|
| The brief pack — read me first | README.md | 310 |
| 00 — The brief | 00__BRIEF.md | 840 |
| 01 — The register format | 01__the-register-format.md | 907 |
| 02 — The influence map | 02__the-influence-map.md | 1,732 |
| 03 — Site architecture | 03__site-architecture.md | 534 |
| 04 — Boundaries and licensing | 04__boundaries-and-licensing.md | 542 |
| 05 — Gaps and open questions | 05__gaps-and-open-questions.md | 539 |
| The immediate-connection register — the structural summary | register__bret-victor__inventing-on-principle.md | 124 |
| The pack's licence | LICENSE.md | 197 |
| influences__seed.json — the seed register | influences__seed.json | 0 |
| 09__source-manifest.csv — the source manifest | 09__source-manifest.csv | 0 |
Nothing here is redacted — and what that costs
The commissioning pack is published exactly as it arrived. It carries no credentials, no hostnames and no do-not-publish list, so unlike two of the sibling sites there was nothing to remove. The leak tripwire still scans every file in the tree on every release, because the check that only runs when you expect a problem is the check that is not running when you have one.
What the pack does carry is a set of judgements about a living person's intellectual formation, several of them explicitly flagged as hypotheses. Publishing it whole means publishing those flags too, which is the point: the tier system exists so a reader can tell a traced claim from a guess without having to take the site's word for it.
Licence, and the split that matters here
Every document in the pack, and every page of this site, is released under CC BY 4.0. Attribution: Dinis Cruz, with AI co-authorship (Claude, Anthropic).
The anchor works are not. Bret Victor's talks, Simon Wardley's book, Kevin Kelly's books, Rush's music, David Rice's keynote, Csikszentmihalyi's Flow, A Pattern Language, The Cathedral and the Bazaar — every work this site says shaped the thinking belongs to its author, and is linked rather than rehosted. The no-verbatim rule is what lets the CC BY stamp on this site's own text stay honest, and the release gate enforces it rather than the site merely stating it.