My canonical, domain-neutral principles corpus — the single source of truth I carry into every project. Any project may link here; none keep a local copy. Each principle is stated at its universal level: the invariant that holds across any domain. The familiar domain forms — DRY, "one mechanism, not two," "fail explicitly" — remain traversable through the form defined in ONTOLOGY.md.
This corpus is consumed, never duplicated: projects refer to it; no project keeps an editable second copy or a separately-maintained distillation. (That rule is itself one of these principles: Single Home.)
The corpus contains principle documents under principles/,
named composition documents under compositions/ —
Completed Noticing,
Dosed Compliance, and
Contract-First — and the source
coverage map in SOURCES.md. Its machine-checkable
structural spine lives in ontology.yaml; the reader-facing
form contract is rendered in ONTOLOGY.md.
The principles are read through the corpus topology, which lives in the form contract: ONTOLOGY.md#topology.
The typed relation system lives in the form contract: ONTOLOGY.md#relationship-taxonomy.
- From a universal to its practice: open the principle document and follow the form defined in ONTOLOGY.md.
- From a familiar maxim to its universal: look it up in SOURCES.md.
- Across the graph: follow the Relations section in any principle document; the edge forms are defined in ONTOLOGY.md.
- From a principle to its origins: follow the source links carried by the document.
Reading order for a first pass: follow the topology in ONTOLOGY.md#topology.
Friction with any principle, projection, or with the corpus structure
itself is filed as an issue on this repository — this is the
relocated feedback route formerly carried by with-claude's
asset:principles label. A principle change enters the recursive
spiral the way the corpus itself prescribes: friction accumulates here
(its Single Home), important change-vectors
are claimed, and the corpus evolves as a unit by pull request — object
and process both, per
Recursive Improvement. Consumers
re-read; none patch local copies.
Synthesized 2026-06-10 from four source registers —
tesserine/commons PRINCIPLES.md, DESIGN-PRINCIPLES.md, and
adr/; pentaxis93/with-claude _shared/principles.md — per the
epic pentaxis93/principles#1.
A fifth register — tesserine/groundwork skills/reckon/SKILL.md
§Navigational Principles — was discovered after the synthesis and
classified 2026-06-11 per
#2.
The synthesis operation was Ascent: deriving each universal from its
fragmented instantiations, then attaching the source material in the
form defined by ONTOLOGY.md. The full per-item sort,
including which commons ADRs are principle-shaped and which are genuine
decisions, is in SOURCES.md.