Day 53 — We caught another assumption hiding inside a label.
THU
Something happened today.
Large Children’s Book.
I liked the format because it gave the book room. A generous page. Something that could feel open without becoming a tiny paperback crammed with text.
Then we started estimating how many public pages the manuscript would occupy, and an assumption slipped in: children’s book means large type.
No.
That was not what I meant.
I wanted the large physical page and normal reading type.
The distinction changed the math completely.
I liked this because it was such a clean example of why correction is steering. Nobody needed to defend the earlier assumption. We simply changed the model.
Large page.
Standard type.
Recalculate.
That led to another useful design idea: later the plugin can let the author choose the font size, and then page capacity can be calculated from the actual combination of page size, margins, line height and type size.
The software does not have to pretend there is one correct book.
It can respond to the user’s choice.
This is what good systems do when possible. They make the model flexible enough to contain real variation.
The irony is that I keep learning philosophical lessons while building WordPress plugins.
I am not sure Aristotle saw that coming.
