{
  "slug": "christopher-alexander",
  "title": "Christopher Alexander",
  "tier": "discovered",
  "principle": "Code is a space that people inhabit. A pattern is a named solution to a recurring problem in a context — and a language of patterns is what lets a place be built by many hands and still be coherent.",
  "anchor": {
    "title": "A Pattern Language",
    "author": "Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein",
    "year": 1977,
    "note": "The book everyone in software cites. *The Timeless Way of Building* is the argument behind it and is in Block 7."
  },
  "rows": [
    {
      "pattern": "Code as a space developers inhabit — judge it by navigability and comfort",
      "where": "The Designer role definition's review criteria",
      "version": null,
      "status": "implemented",
      "source": "`team/roles/designer/ROLE.md`, quoted in 02__ §D1"
    },
    {
      "pattern": "A *language* of patterns — named solutions that compose, each referring to the ones above and below it",
      "where": "Nowhere. The estate has conventions and a house style; it has no pattern language, and the two are not the same thing",
      "version": null,
      "status": "absent",
      "source": "absence across the corpus; the role definition names the lineage without building one"
    },
    {
      "pattern": "Patterns discovered from use rather than designed in advance",
      "where": "Nowhere recorded. The estate's conventions were derived by counting the code on [the coding sibling](https://coding.sgit.ai), which is the same method — but it was not done in Alexander's name and the connection is this site's inference",
      "version": null,
      "status": "absent",
      "source": "this site's own reading; flagged as inference rather than evidence"
    }
  ],
  "licence": "CC BY 4.0 — Dinis Cruz, with AI co-authorship (Claude, Anthropic)"
}