shape-article

name	shape-article
description	Identify and protect an article's living center before drafting, editing, or reviewing it. Use for any gkoreli.com article to choose its governing form, preserve unresolved experience and load-bearing roughness, give humans and AI agents enough context to follow the work, and route the draft through the correct writing skills without forcing a lesson, verdict, or narrative arc.

Shape Article

Choose the form before shaping the prose. Judge the article by whether its form tells the truth about the state in which it was written.

Find the Living Center

Inspect the draft, prompts, and author context. Determine:

• What remains alive, unresolved, or capable of changing after publication?
• What does the author want, fear, risk, or resist saying?
• Which contradiction must remain strong on both sides?
• Where does thought occur on the page instead of being reported after the fact?
• Which passage costs status or could only have been written from this moment?
• What would conventional editing falsely settle, explain, or smooth away?

Do not invent a stake or feeling when the source material lacks one. Name the gap and return it to the author.

Choose the Governing Form

Let forms mix, but choose one to govern movement and the ending.

Form	Required movement	Honest ending	Governing skill
Exposed essay	Stay with a live wound; let contradictions and self-discovery remain visible	Stop at the deepest honest point without a lesson	personal-essays
Essay of inquiry	Think against the starting belief; make the question more precise or difficult	Leave a better question, tension, or possibility	personal-essays
Field note or build journal	Record a time-bound state, pressure, attempt, or blocker	Mark what changed and what remains unknown	blog-writing, then personal-essays when a human spine is present
Engineering argument or decision record	Test a claim against evidence, alternatives, failures, and constraints	Give a bounded verdict, trade-off, or decision rule	blog-writing, then shareable-engineering
Evidence-led engineering investigation	Start from an owned system or failure; test a disputed claim across implementation, reproduction, and outside evidence	Give a bounded verdict, provenance, limits, and evidence that would change it	blog-writing with its investigation reference, then shareable-engineering
OSS Radar research synthesis	Reconstruct an open-source project or cohort's competing theories and audit them against code and primary evidence	Give a calibrated product or adoption verdict with provenance and limits	oss-radar, then shareable-engineering

Do not punish one form for lacking another form's payoff. An exposed essay needs no takeaway. A research verdict needs more than emotional truth.

Protect the Live State Without Making It a Formula

When an owned engineering failure is active, consider the article that can be written truthfully now. Do not recommend waiting for a benchmark, adoption curve, clean measurement window, or completed outcome merely so the author can sound more authoritative later.

This is a routing safeguard, not a house style. Do not force every piece into open-wound form. Earned expertise, past-tense lessons, growth, resolved tradeoffs, and retrospective synthesis are valuable when they are the truth of the material. An article may braid all three time layers: past experience for lessons, present tension for contact, and future intention for what remains possible. Choose the governing form from context.

Current evidence is enough when it can establish:

• what was built or believed;
• what failed, hurt, or became ambiguous;
• which mechanism explains the failure;
• what action the author took and why;
• which tensions or outcomes remain unresolved.

The unresolved outcome is part of the article's evidence boundary. Name it. A later measurement can earn a continuation without replacing the open-wound article.

One valid pattern, when time itself creates two meaningful states:

1. Now: publish the active pain, present-tense reasoning, implementation, available evidence, and unresolved tensions.
2. Later: publish changed evidence and earned lessons in the past tense while naming whatever new tension is alive then. The continuation is not required to imitate the first article's form.

Waiting is justified only when a material factual claim lacks enough evidence to publish safely, publication would cause concrete harm, or the author has not supplied the human stake. “The data will be cleaner later” is not enough. Do not launder vulnerability into retrospective authority.

Protect Before Editing

Mark load-bearing material before changing the draft:

• Present-tense uncertainty and unresolved stakes
• Precise emotional naming
• Confessions that risk status
• Contradictions the author genuinely holds
• Self-interruptions where the mind catches itself
• Repetition whose pressure changes on each return
• Sentences closest to the author's arguing voice
• Concrete names, dates, numbers, scenes, code, and technical evidence

For an exposed essay, do not draft or replace the author's prose. Quote the alive passage back, flag weak or armored passages, and let the author rewrite them.

Create Movement Without Demanding Resolution

Require movement, not a universal arc. Let the article move by:

• Deepening a question
• Revealing a contradiction
• Changing the meaning of an earlier detail
• Raising the personal or technical stakes
• Testing one explanation against another
• Recording an action taken while the outcome remains unknown
• Returning to a phrase or image under new pressure

Allow linear argument, circling, fragments, accumulation, juxtaposition, or a single sustained block when the form carries the experience. Cut accidental disorder. Preserve deliberate disorder that lets the reader feel how the mind or problem behaves.

Serve Humans and Agents With the Same Article

Do not flatten the body into a separate machine-facing summary. Preserve the full thinking process and add anchors around it:

• Use a truthful title, concrete description, date, section, and tags. A signature title may stay literary; article-discovery-positioning decides how cold-reader handles belong on the other surfaces without flattening it.
• Name projects, people, concepts, and time shifts consistently.
• Keep factual claims close to their sources.
• Distinguish observation, external evidence, inference, fear, and judgment through natural language.
• Use headings when they aid navigation and do not violate the chosen form.
• Add an orientation sentence when a cold reader needs context, but do not reveal an answer the article does not have.
• Keep the .md endpoint, semantic HTML, structured data, and provenance accurate.

Treat lived uncertainty as information. It exposes constraints, competing explanations, abandoned paths, and open questions that a polished conclusion may erase.

Run the Editorial Passes in Order

1. Diagnose the living center and governing form.
2. Mark protected passages and failure risks.
3. Apply the governing skill without importing another form's ending.
4. Shape movement, recurrence, and reader orientation.
5. Verify facts, dates, references, quotations, and claim boundaries.
6. Apply article-discovery-positioning after the article's truth and claim boundaries are stable; accept a narrow or no-op doorway when that protects the form.
7. Apply shareable-engineering only where its engineering trust and share rules fit.
8. Apply polish-prose last. Restore any edit that reduced aliveness, precision, or voice.
9. Read the result as both a human reader and an agent reconstructing state, evidence, uncertainty, and time.

Reject These Failure Modes

• Forcing a lesson, redemption arc, verdict, or action plan
• Treating unresolved writing as incomplete writing
• Treating rawness as permission for shapelessness or avoidable confusion
• Manufacturing vulnerability or making pain admirable
• Converting live contradiction into a balanced survey
• Cutting repetition before checking its function
• Adding a quotable claim only to satisfy a checklist
• Researching the feeling away instead of sourcing the factual frame
• Building more editorial machinery instead of helping the current article exist

Improve From Real Use

After publication or author review, record what helped the piece and what harmed it. Update a skill only when the same failure recurs across articles. Keep one-off preferences with the article instead of turning them into universal law.