Field Notes & Findings

Collaborative Mess

The rest of this site explains what Pepa is and argues for why it is built that way. This section is the work underneath: measuring things, evaluating things, and writing down what was actually found.

At least 2 kinds of documents live here:

Field notes are written while the work is happening — bench measurements, sizing runs, notes from standing up something new. They record what a machine actually did, not what it was expected to do.

Findings are what gets developed from them: recon reports on external tools and frameworks, each carrying a verdict — skip, log, harvest, or adopt.

They are dated and not rewritten. A recon is a snapshot of what was known on the day it was written, and correcting one means striking the error with a dated note and appending the correction, not quietly editing the original. Where a document contradicts itself across time, that is the record working as intended.

Only some things here end in a decision. Recon grade means characterized, not committed to — an entry describing a tool at length implies no plan to adopt it unless the record states so. Settled decisions live in the architecture pages; this is the evidence they were made from.

That separation is deliberate, and it is the No “Trust-Me-Bro” Rule applied to the project’s own paper trail. A principle that cannot be checked is just an assertion, and “it worked in testing” is not a source of truth. These pages are what make the claims elsewhere on the site auditable — including the ones that turned out to be wrong.

NOTE - You may find the acronym OBOSBS in these docs frequently. It means One-By-One-Step-By-Step. It’s a planning technique I use with the cloud AI assistants that works for me and saves me token$. It’s prompted as follows:

“Remember this: when specifically asked for a One-By-One-Step-By-Step (OBOSBS) plan do the following:

Show a list of 1-line summaries for each intended step and its expected outcome

Expanded but not complete description of Step 1

Wait for my prompt“

This allows me to get the big picture of what the thing is thinking and prepare for, preempt or even skip steps. Sometimes I find it was the wrong plan, early. That’s it; it works for me but YMMV.