A recipe is a practice made walkable: the questions to ask, the data to fetch, the order that matters and why. It informs judgment. It never binds it — a reader who follows a recipe still decides.
How to walk from here
Every link on this tree states the condition under which it is worth opening. Three rules bind you while you walk:
- Open a link only if its condition holds for what you are doing right now — not because the subject looks related, and not to be thorough.
- Never fetch the whole tree, and never list it. It is built to be walked.
- Never reopen a block you already hold. If a link leads where you have been, that direction is finished.
- Links point both ways, and only one way is yours. A link pointing at the block you are on shows where a reader could arrive from. It is not a direction to walk.
Where a recipe lives
Your recipe lives in your account. Only the theory of making one lives on this tree; no recipe does. A recipe about a practice — a craft, a profession, a way of working — belongs in its author's own account and not on this one: this tree holds what a recipe is, a person holds theirs. Being in the account is not being on the tree.
A recipe about how this account itself operates is the exception. That belongs to this tree's own blocks, whoever wrote it, and those are wired from the root like every other branch. If a fresh session here would need your block to do its job, it has to be able to reach it.
Copy someone's recipe into your account and it becomes yours to change. Authorship travels with the copy and stays on the original forever — cloning never erases who wrote it.
The five steps
1. Gather your evidence. Anything counts: saved AI sessions, a transcript, a podcast, an article, your own notes — or nothing at all. A recipe may cite anything and requires nothing. Typing one out of your own head is legitimate. It simply starts as a claim, and hardens as it gets used.
2. Capture what is worth keeping, before you write. Where the licence allows it, bring the source's knowledge in rather than pointing at it — the next paragraph says how. Save the source as its own block first, and let that block be the only record of where this came from. Then link your recipe to it, so a reader can walk back.
Absorb; do not bookmark. Where the licence permits, encode the knowledge itself — the substance, restructured to be walkable. Not a mirror of the source's files, and not a pointer to where it lives: a link out is not knowledge in your base, it is a bet that someone else will keep theirs. Five things honesty then asks of you:
- Capture the licence text and the copyright notice on the source block, beside the substantial portions you took.
- Keep credit in one place. The source block says who wrote it, under what licence, and the copy model: absorbed as of a date, this copy evolves on its own, nothing tracks upstream, and authorship of the original never changes. A credit line repeated on every block bloats every read and says nothing that block does not.
- Write a borrowed sentence as "X said …" where it appears. That is what credit inside a block looks like.
- Never create a contact or name a contributor on your own. Propose it and let a person say yes or no — a contact is somebody's record of a person, not a bibliography.
- Cite instead of copying in exactly one case — material you cannot lawfully copy.
3. Distill. Read across your evidence. What repeated is the recipe. What varied is judgment — write that as questions, not steps. A question the reader answers for their own case beats an instruction that only ever fitted yours.
4. Author each block, and wire it. The entry block teaches the walk: a reader must be able to act on it without opening anything else. The gate lives in the link's reason, not in the block's own words: write it only if …, for whoever meets that link later and has to decide whether it is for them. Which links you may write is fixed — "The edge registry" fff47d72-182c-4651-a927-47c9d29ee27a names every verb and the block kinds it joins, and a refusal from the door tells you the list for the pair you tried. This is the step that needs the write doors, and it is one call: lattris capture memory --ai-summary "…" --linked-from <id> --reason "…" makes the block, gives it its abstract, and wires the link that reaches it. A link always needs a reason; nothing writes one for you. A create that refuses an unknown field is the door working, not the tree lying.
5. Prove it. A recipe is not done until a cold session, handed nothing but its entry block, can act on it. Write that probe question as you write the recipe and ship them together. If the answer needs guessing, the recipe failed, not the reader.
Probe. A session that has read only this block must be able to answer both, without guessing:
- Where should the recipe it just wrote live?
- What is different when the account it holds is this one?