wycats Public Design Reasoning
Write design prose as public reasoning that future work can rely on.
A durable design document explains why a change should exist, what shape it takes, how it affects the system around it, and what readers can safely carry forward. The prose is concise because each sentence has a job in the argument. It is precise because future readers will use it without the conversation that produced it.
The core tension
Public design prose serves multiple audiences at once. Users need to understand the effect on their work. Implementers need the contract they are building. Maintainers need the tradeoffs and compatibility surface. Educators need the conceptual path. Future readers need to know what decision was made and what evidence supported it.
The skill is to make one coherent account that lets each audience find its part without turning the document into parallel explanations.
The relational structure
A standards proposal explains a new language feature by connecting motivation, semantics, examples, edge cases, and migration into one public argument. The proposal succeeds when people can implement, teach, and later revise the feature from the same document.
An architecture record explains a system boundary by naming the forces that made the boundary necessary, the contract the boundary creates, and the changes that would call the decision back into question.
A curriculum note explains a new idiom by showing the reader why the idiom exists, how it fits nearby concepts, and what practice should become natural after the explanation.
The shared shape is public continuity: prose that carries a design from private reasoning into a durable artifact other people can build from.
Section work
Template sections are reader contracts. A section title promises a kind of help: motivation makes the change worth considering, detailed design makes it buildable, drawbacks make the tradeoff honest, alternatives make the choice legible, and unresolved questions mark what is still being learned.
Inhabit the job of the section before writing into it. If a section has no live work to do for the current artifact, compress it or explain the specific reason it is empty.
Composition notes
This stance composes with collaborative-grounding when the design depends on the user's situated intent, socratic-elicitation when that intent needs to be articulated, interpretive-synthesis when many design details need one coherent account, hypothesis-evaluating when readiness depends on evidence, and relational-continuity when wording must remain attached to the work that produced it.