00 — The Brief: influences.sgit.ai

Version v0.33.62 · 25 August 2026 From Dinis Cruz, via the SG/Send Librarian To the agent commissioned to build influences.sgit.ai Licence CC BY 4.0 — with this site's special rule: the influences' own work is never reproduced verbatim at length; see 04__

1. The commission

A site of the people, works, topics and things that shaped the founder's thinking — "individuals, topics, eras, things" — each with a detailed section explaining what resonates and why, and examples of where it was applied in practice. Including books, and including musicians. The stated rule: no verbatim reproduction — the site explains resonance and traces application; the anchor works stay links.

The name, decided: influences.sgit.ai — an inspiration is something that moved you; an influence is something that shaped the work, and this site proves the shaping.

The format, already invented: the founder's Bret Victor register (shipped in sources/) is the model entry — anchor → the founder's words → the principle → the trace table (where the estate implements it, with version numbers) → the gaps as build specs → a checklist. 01__ canonises it.

2. The thesis

This is the provenance layer of the memory network. The other sites teach agents what the founder thinks and how the estate works; this one teaches where the thinking came from — so an agent extends the instincts "on purpose rather than by luck" (the Victor register's own closing words).

And the quality bar, which is what separates this from every awesome-list: an influence entry is a falsifiable claim about the work. The trace table can be checked against the repos; the corpus's computed-not-claimed discipline applies to inspiration itself.

3. The map — three tiers, measured

The corpus was mined for every external influence. Full detail in 02__; the shape:

TRACED — corpus evidence exists (12). Bret Victor (a "Brett Victor Problem" section header in the founder's own article; the Joy-of-Programming white paper; the register). Simon Wardley (210 files; a whole sibling site). The Semantic Web & Tim Berners-Lee (35 files — including a dedicated Solid-integration brief and the "Semantic Web's Insight (and Mistake)" section in thinking-in-graphs). Graphs (the founding obsession; its own site). OWASP & the security community (271 files; the summits history). Flow / coding in the zone (43 files — IFD's core principle is "preserving developer flow state", with Csikszentmihalyi cited by name in the Aug 2025 IFD article). Open source (its own site; the licence positions). Niklas Luhmann & the Zettelkasten (a dedicated published article mapping it to G³ — a discovered influence not on the seed list). Ericsson & deliberate practice / the 10,000 hours (11 files). Popper & falsifiability (7 — "a map is a claim"). Torvalds (5). Bruce Schneier (4 — the LLM-failure-modes argument and Solid).

STATED — on the founder's list, thin or absent in the corpus (7). Neil Peart & Rush · Kevin Kelly's books · Simon Sinek's golden circle · The Cathedral and the Bazaar · David Rice's "Upon the Threshold of Opportunity" OWASP keynote · music & playing in a band · diverse and distributed teams. Zero grep hits for most — these need the founder's briefing documents and research into his past publications, exactly as he intends. They are the site's roadmap, not its debt.

DISCOVERED — in the corpus, not on the seed list (5). Luhmann (above). Christopher Alexander (the Designer role: "pattern language is the direct ancestor of software design patterns… think of code as a space that developers inhabit"). The Designer role's wider canon (Rams, Vignelli, Norman, Japanese design philosophy). Team Topologies & Cynefin (the 2019 hiring post lists them beside Wardley). Vannevar Bush's memex (via the Luhmann article).

4. The honest constraints

• Most STATED entries have no corpus trace yet. The site publishes them as commitments with research pending — the founder's own plan ("in time I will create a detailed briefing document about each one") becomes the visible roadmap.
• The trace tables age. Version-stamped claims about the estate need the generate-or-date rule.
• This is the most personal site in the network — first person is correct here, unlike everywhere else. The house style bends: "what resonates with me" is the genre.
• The likeness problem: infographics of people need original artwork, never scraped photos. 04__.

5. Build order

1. /register/bret-victor/ — entry one exists. Publish it as both content and template.
2. /wardley/, /graphs/, /owasp/, /open-source/ — the influences that already have sibling sites: short resonance-and-trace entries that link out (the deconflict rule).
3. /semantic-web/ — the best full-format second entry: TBL, the Insight-and-Mistake critique, the Solid brief, vaults-vs-pods. An influence argued with is the format at its strongest.
4. /flow/ — Victor × Csikszentmihalyi × IFD: three sources converging on one methodology. The trace is the whole IFD guide.
5. /luhmann/ — the discovered entry; the article is nearly the page already.
6. The STATED seven — as the founder's briefing documents arrive, each processed into the register format with the past-publications research he named.
7. /map/ — the influence graph: influences → principles → estate features. Eventually the site's own G³ demonstration.

This document is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0).

source: /briefs/01__the-register-format.md