Prompt: “let’s think about shared lists”
/kyspec-brainstorm is a conversation with a partner who challenges, not a form. The partner’s
first move is to ground: grep -rn "share" specs/ ideas/ changes/ finds nothing, and the only
trace is lantern#9, a reader asking to “share my list with my book club”. It reads the issue.
Turn 1. The partner names the riskiest assumption: that “share” means “edit together”. Lantern has no accounts; a list is a browser’s list. Accounts are a different product. What did the reader actually ask for? The issue says “show”. Two questions back: is anyone else asking, and would a read-only link have satisfied this one?
Turn 2. The user: one reader, and probably yes. The partner lays out three approaches, how each works and when it wins: a read-only capability link, accounts with members, and export and send, which principles #1 already provides. It says plainly that the third costs nothing today and that the reader was told to do exactly that.
Turn 3. The user agrees there is no second reader yet. The partner asks whether a shared
list should show archived books; the open change archive-a-book makes the default list
exclude them, and a share should follow the default. That becomes an open question in the
file, not a decision.
The file, every time. A brainstorm that ends in “not now” still ends in a file, so the next
session finds the thinking instead of redoing it. The partner writes
ideas/shared-lists.md with its first line:
status: parked — waits on a second reader asking; the one who did wanted to show a friend, and a read-only link covers that without accounts
Then the problem and who has it, the three approaches with the pick for when it is opened, the open questions, and prior art as links. It self-reviews (no TBD, nothing in the file that was not discussed), commits, and ends: the path, the status, and no next step, because a parked idea has none.
Six months later a session asked to “add sharing” greps ideas/, reads the first line, and
knows in one glance what was decided, why, and what would reopen it.