| name | wholeness |
| description | Choose between two things by feeling which one has more life. Read each design until you can hold it whole in your mind, set the ego aside, then ask which one is a truer picture of your self — which one you would rather become. Trust the gut before the reasons, and check whether another good engineer's gut agrees. A felt-sense tie-breaker for two options that both work. Use when stuck between two designs, APIs, schemas, or structures and the tests cannot separate them. Triggers on "which feels right", "which is more alive", "gut check between two designs", "which one is better", "can't decide between".
|
| metadata | {"author":"Mark Anthony Cianfrani","version":"0.1.0"} |
Wholeness
Some things have more life than others. Not because we like them — because of how
they are built. The parts help each other. There is a center the thing is really
about. Nothing is forced. You can feel it.
This is hard to read off a spec. We are trained to distrust the gut and defer to
what is clever, what is new, what the team expects. So we use a trick. We ask
which of the two things is a better picture of our own self. That question quiets
the ego and the intellect, and lets a deeper, shared sense speak.
Its sibling mirror-of-self asks which one you would rather maintain. That is a
useful question, but it is not this one. This asks which one has more life. Run
both and see which serves you.
The instrument
The question, asked of two things, one at a time:
- Which one is a truer picture of my self?
- Which one would I rather become?
- Which one has more life in it — which feels whole and settled, and which feels
forced or dead?
Answer with the gut. The reasons come after, if at all.
Use the honest self, not the polished one. Picture the whole of you, flaws and
all. The self you wish you were picks the impressive option. The self you are
picks the one with life.
The procedure
-
Get both whole in mind. Read each option until you can hold it at once — as
one thing, not a list of parts. You cannot mirror what you have not absorbed.
-
Empty the ego. Set aside which is cleverer, which is newer, which you would
be proud to have written, which the team is expecting. None of that is the
question.
-
Ask the mirror, slowly. One option, then the other. Let the body answer
before the mind explains.
-
Check for convergence. Ask another good engineer the same way, alone, with
no pre-argument. If you both land on the same one, that agreement is the signal
— it means you are reading something real, not a private taste. If you scatter,
neither is clearly more alive yet, or an ego answered. Sit longer, or stop.
-
Then look for the why. The reasons are there: parts that strengthen each
other, a center that holds, room to grow. But the feeling came first, and the
feeling is the instrument. Do not let a clever reason talk you out of what you
felt.
Reading life in code
Alive — parts strengthen each other; each piece makes the others clearer.
A strong center: one obvious thing the design is about. It feels settled, nothing
fighting to get out. You could grow it without breaking it. Nothing arbitrary.
Dead — parts ignore or fight each other. No center; everything equally
important, so nothing is. It feels forced; you can see where it was bent to fit.
Brittle; growth means surgery. Arbitrary; "why is it like this" has no answer but
"it just is."
When not to use it
One option is wrong, faster by a real margin, or required by a constraint. Facts
win; the mirror is for genuine ties. And not for trivial, reversible picks — the
felt sense is for things you will live inside.
