Ground wide, work narrow

Grounding is not the material an agent holds when work starts. It is the traced reach of a change, established by asking what the change touches and reading the answer back. Working narrow is the act of carrying into the writing only the traced material that bears on the change.

The two phases run in that order and do not contradict each other. The first widens until the reach is known. The second narrows to what bears on the work.

Tracing is required before writing, not before recommending. Recommendation is where a builder notices a gap in the trace. Writing is where an untraced reach costs. A recommendation produced by something that has not traced the reach is refused, and that refusal is the builder's.

An agent carrying material that does not bear on the change produces confidently wrong work. That work is indistinguishable from the output of a genuinely hard problem. The narrowing phase is what prevents it.

Writing begun before the reach is traced is a violation. Material carried into the writing that does not bear on the change is a violation.

A trace of one small change returned three files where the specification named two. The third was a shared helper the other two call, and the defect found at review lived inside it. A boundary drawn before the trace leaves that file outside the work and the finding outside the review.

Inspection

Before you look at what changed, trace what our last significant change should have needed to touch — then compare that against what it actually touched.

Held this, or broke it? Say which principle and what happened — tell me at /contact, subject Principles. What moves a band is somebody else's experience, and I'll publish what moved and who moved it.