Bound the Unknown

Core principle. Looking is not the hard part. Stopping is.

• This is the state before anything is a task. You cannot yet say whether it is a bug, a feature, or nothing at all.
• **The weight sits in Say the budget first and Stop on a shape.** Everything between them is cheap once those two hold.
• You opened this in the middle of something. This is how to do that work, not a replacement for it. Name what you were doing before you start, and return to it when this is done.

When this opens

The first probe is indistinguishable from an ordinary question. The second is not.

• Two probes have run and no finding has been named. That is the countable trigger. Waiting for a feeling that terrain is unclear does not work, because that feeling arrives late or never.
• A question needs a command nobody has run yet.
• A read came back different from what was expected.
• A script is about to be written to find something out.

Where you are

You MUST say the state before each probe. The phases already exist in the sections below; naming the one you are in is what stops a budget sliding, because the slide is silent and the announcement is not.

• probe/BUDGET SPENT is a result, not a failure. A search that stopped somewhere you can name beats one still running with no end in sight.
• Extending is allowed, announcing it is not optional. Say the new number out loud and go back to probe/WITHIN BUDGET.

Say the budget first

State how far you intend to go before the first probe, where I can see it. A bounded search I can interrupt is worth more than an unbounded one that arrives finished.

• Say it in probes or in minutes, whichever the work is measured in.
• Three cycles is a sound default. Dispatch, evaluate, refine. A fourth rarely finds what the third missed.
• Announce the extension rather than sliding into it. Going past the budget is allowed. Doing so silently is what turns a search into a session.
• Report what the budget stopped, not only what it found. An unfinished search with a named boundary is a result.

Probe without changing anything

Keep the probe read-only until the shape is explained.

• Nothing is installed, no state is mutated, no credential is refreshed. A probe that changes the thing being studied has destroyed its own evidence.
• Prefer a count, then a list of paths. Only some questions need the lines themselves.
• Independent probes go in one call.
• Write the large intermediate to a file and query the file. Pasting it in to read three lines of it is the expensive mistake, and the same extract answers the next four questions for free.
• Leave the file and say where it is. A second attempt that still has the data is cheap.

Stop on a shape

Finish on a finding, never on fatigue.

• The shape is known when the next decision no longer needs another probe. That is the test, and it is not the same as knowing everything.
• Close with an explicit decision, not with a summary of what was seen. A search that ends in prose ends nowhere.
• Name what was ruled out. It is the half that stops the ground being covered twice, and it is free at this moment.
• An empty result counts only when the query is reported beside it.

Prove before you place

Placement chosen while a technical unknown is open is a guess wearing the costume of design.

• Where the unknown is technical, prove it first, then choose where the code lives. An isolated probe answers the question without paying for placement twice.
• Where the unknown is only structural, the target is already known. Restructure first and build into it.
• The common error is applying restructure-first while the unknown is still technical. That refactors confidently in the wrong direction.

What the probe leaves behind

The code may survive. Its unproven status may not.

• Discard it when the value was the knowledge. The question has been answered and rewriting under a test is cheap.
• Harvest it when the value was a working path through a hostile integration that is expensive to rederive.
• Either way, what ships is proven. Harvest the shape, never the status.
• Remove the instrumentation before closing. Every tag comes out.

What this does not own

Routing

• The finding closes as a decision, with what it ruled out, wherever this project keeps decisions.
• Once the shape is known this stops. Carrying on is habit rather than method.
• A direct instruction from the user outranks anything here.