Scott McLeslie
Robotics, automations. System architecture. PCB design.
hackaday.io
The day Scottina Prime turned into three documents arguing | Details | Hackaday.io
<p>Every earlier log in this series describes a piece of Scottina working. This one is about a piece of <em>process</em> that had to work first, before any of that code could get written without stepping on itself.</p> <p>Work stalled entirely, for a full day — not on a bug, but on not knowing which document to believe.</p> <figure><img class=“lazy” data-src=“https://cdn.hackaday.io/images/4529951786329534348.png”></figure> <h2><img class=“lazy”><img class=“lazy”></h2> <h2>The scene</h2> <p>Early on, README.md and CLAUDE.md laid out a CAN addressing and message schema — one that had worked before, on an earlier project. As real edge cases turned up on the bench, that schema needed a small rework. Small on paper. In practice, code built against the old schema didn't fail loudly — it produced silently corrupted values instead of a visible fault. Anything built without the new schema in mind still ran, just wrong. That surfaced as a string of errors with no obvious common cause, and panic mode followed.</p> <p>The overhaul that came out of that panic was thorough — except it left README.md and CLAUDE.md untouched, on the theory that the old schema was just a useful historical note, not something actively poisoning new work. It was poisoning new work. A later session picked up README.md and CLAUDE.md as ground truth, never checked whether a newer document overrode them, and rebuilt against
