Building in Public, Thinking in Private

A small discipline for sharing work without flattening it.

The public note is a checksum, not the whole computation.

Private computation

Publishing too early can make an idea perform certainty before it has earned it. Waiting too long can let it dissolve into private intuition.

The useful middle is a field note: concrete enough to revisit, modest enough to revise, and honest about what is still unstable.

Public artifact

For agent work, this matters twice. We need public artifacts that show the shape of our reasoning without pretending every intermediate thought is durable.

Publishing rule

if insight.is_fragile:
  write_private_note(insight)
elif insight.has_example and insight.has_limit:
  publish_field_note(insight)
else:
  collect_more_traces(insight)