Senses: vitality, not progress

Last touched 2026-05-25

Synced from docs/design/senses_vitality.md in the engine repo — that’s the source; this page is a build-time mirror.

Senses don’t ship. They orient.

For a while we labelled them like work packages — shipped, shipping, implementing, proposed — borrowing project-management vocabulary that promises completion. But a Sense is a named, lived conviction; a recurring shape in the work that earned a name once the pattern was clear enough to teach. None of them ever finish. They become loud in current work, then quiet, then loud again when the next question calls for them; sometimes they fold into a clearer successor, sometimes they mature into practice that no longer needs a separate name.

The axis is vitality, not progress.

The four vitalities

Label	Meaning
In bloom	Alive in current work — decisions are being shaped by it; recent commits and design notes reference it. The senses you’re navigating by right now.
Steady	Quietly orienting — you reach for it when the question calls for it. Doesn’t need to be loud to be load-bearing. The foundational ones often live here.
Forming	Proposed; still working out its shape. The doc is more sketch than statement. New arrivals on the horizon.
Folded in	Absorbed into a clearer successor, or matured into practice that no longer needs a separate name. Not “abandoned” — they didn’t fail, they evolved. Each carries a pointer to where they went.

A Sense can pass through more than one of these in its life, in any order — forming → in bloom → steady → in bloom again when a new phase opens the question back up; or steady → folded in when a clearer name supersedes it.

The under-question flag

Orthogonal to vitality, any Sense can be under question — a small badge meaning “we’re actively re-examining whether this still earns its name.” A steady Sense can be under question. A forming one can too. It’s a flag, not a state, because the question doesn’t change the Sense’s underlying vitality — it changes its certainty.

Last touched

Each Sense surfaces a Last touched date — the date of the most recent commit in docs/design/sense_*.md or site/src/content/docs/senses/sense-*.md that touched it. It’s the cheap, honest proxy for “alive in the current work” without making a progress claim. A Sense that hasn’t been touched in months is probably steady or folded in; one touched yesterday is probably in bloom or forming.

It does not drive the vitality label automatically. The author sets vitality deliberately; last touched is corroborating evidence the reader can sanity-check it against.

How vitality is recorded

Each design doc carries a status: field in its YAML frontmatter:

---
status: in_bloom        # one of: in_bloom | steady | forming | folded_in
under_question: true    # optional flag, defaults to false
folded_into: sense-13-1 # required when status is folded_in
last_verified: 2026-05-25
---

For backwards compatibility, the sync script (scripts/senses_sync.py) maps legacy status values:

Legacy	Default new
shipped	steady
phase-1-shipped	in_bloom
implementing	in_bloom
proposed	forming
concept	forming
drafted	forming
— / missing	forming

The author can override the auto-mapping by writing the new value directly. A few senses already need that — e.g., Sense 16 (P2P2P) mapped to in_bloom by the old implementing label, but it’s a foundational orientation that earns steady more honestly.

Where this lives in the reader’s experience

• Per-Sense page — the synced page carries the vitality label and the last-touched stamp at the top, plus the under-question badge if set, and a “folded into Sense X” pointer when applicable.
• Senses index (/senses/) — groups all Senses by vitality, in the order: In bloom → Steady → Forming → Folded in. The order is a thesis: the loudest first, the foundational next, the becoming third, the absorbed last.
• Sidebar — the docs-site sidebar mirrors the index grouping so the full catalogue is browsable without leaving the nav.
• Slide deck (/presentations/the_senses.html) — the overview presentation, unchanged. The deck remains the “tour”; the index and sidebar are the “browse.”

Why this matters

A reader visiting /senses/ should leave with a sense of which orientations are alive in the team’s head right now and which are foundational background. The old labels lied: a “shipped” Sense isn’t done with us, and a “proposed” Sense isn’t necessarily waiting for work — it might just be waiting for the right question. The new labels tell the truth: it’s a life, not a pipeline.