canonlisted

# Canon A **canon** is the practice you have earned the right to hold, because you watched it work somewhere real. One repo gives you a habit. Several repos agreeing gives you a practice. Only practices enter the canon. Commands and the entry format are in [MINING.md](MINING.md). ## Mine the arc, not the snapshot Conventions are answers. The arc tells you what the questions were. Four moments carry almost all the signal: - **Day one.** What shipped in the first commit, and what was already abstracted before anything worked. Seams present that early are the ones that survived contact. - **First carve.** The first real refactor. What discomfort triggered it, and where the maintainer chose to cut. - **The clamp.** When a rule stopped being prose and became mechanical: a CI check, a lint rule, a budget. Clamps ship *after* the pain that justified them, so the commit before a clamp tells you what it is holding back. - **The reversal.** A convention adopted and later abandoned. The most informative event in a repo and the one nobody looks for. ## Practice, not habit A **habit** is local and arbitrary. Nothing breaks if you do it differently: scope vocabulary, file naming, branch names. A **practice** has a failure mode behind it. Remove it and a specific bug walks back in. Every entry names the failure mode. A practice recorded without its trigger is cargo cult, and you will apply it where that failure cannot occur and pay the cost for nothing. ## Corroborate