Knowledge Work Foundations
This repo collects the universal principles that underlie structured knowledge work — the claims that would still hold if you did the work with paper and pencil, and still hold when you do it with LLM agents. No tooling required, no stack assumed.
What this is
Section titled “What this is”A curated set of principles, patterns, and philosophical alignment for how cognitive work composes into durable artifacts. The claims are substrate-agnostic: they’re justified by how attention, memory, and authority work, not by which editor or AI tool you use.
This is the trunk of a larger system. Two downstream repositories specialize these foundations into opinionated implementations — see related repos below.
Three classification axes
Section titled “Three classification axes”Every principle and pattern on this site lives at the intersection of three orthogonal axes. One-sentence crib:
Tier asks who. Stratum asks how portable. Tier-of-abstraction asks what’s assumed.
| Axis | Answers | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Tier (1 / 2 / 3) | WHO is this for? | Organizational sections in a repo (kernel / stack / work). This trunk repo publishes Tier 1 content only. |
| Stratum (1–5) | HOW MUCH of this transfers if copied? | Five strata — colored badge under each page title |
| Tier of abstraction (0 / 1 / 2) | WHAT substrate does this claim assume? | Tiers of abstraction — zero-tier = paper+pencil, tier-1 = digital, tier-2 = LLM-agentic |
The axes are lenses, not taxonomies — real artifacts slide between strata and tiers. The labels help you weight how stable is this advice without pretending certainty.
Start here
Section titled “Start here”- Principles & Foundations — the ten claims, each readable standalone.
- Philosophy — the single-page condensed version.
- Philosophical alignment — the thinkers and traditions behind the claims (Thomistic / virtue-ethics lineage for moral framings; Alexander, Drucker, Simon, Wittgenstein for the structural ones).
- Patterns — universal structural patterns, unopinionated about stack.
Related repos
Section titled “Related repos”This trunk publishes only the substrate-agnostic foundation. Two downstream repositories specialize it for specific domains:
- agentic-workflow-and-tech-stack — the same principles applied to an opinionated LLM-agentic development stack (WSL + Claude Code + Obsidian + Zellij). Stack-specific patterns, agent-memory system, skills and agents for Claude Code.
- (Future) domain-specific workflows that reference this trunk for their universal foundation.
Status
Section titled “Status”The principles section is stable and will be refined rather than restructured. Patterns and philosophical alignment expand as new lineages are traced.