Bearings

---
name: bearings
description: "Explore frontend architecture by reframing journeys, ownership, and the experience of time. Use before committing a product direction, not as a compulsory frontend architecture checklist."
argument-hint: "[the frontend product or feature to scope before building]"
metadata:
  kind: heuristic
---

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# bearings

Explore frontend architecture by reframing journeys, ownership, and the experience of time. Use before committing a product direction, not as a compulsory frontend architecture checklist.

## Starting point

A frontend is one interpretation of a user journey. Change the story of where the user is, what they know, or what waiting means, and a different architecture may become natural.

Bring a question, fragment, reference, or tension. Follow whichever association becomes useful; these invitations are not a sequence to complete. Speculation should remain distinguishable from an observed fact.

## Thought experiments

### Change the journey metaphor

Treat the experience as a conversation, a workbench, or a guided expedition. What should persist, what should be visible, and what can remain unfinished in each?

### Design under a different clock

Imagine instant responses, intermittent connectivity, then hour-long jobs. Invent continuity for each world rather than hiding every delay behind a spinner.

### Move ownership

Imagine the URL owns the workspace, the server owns it, or the person carries it as a local document. What new sharing, recovery, and collaboration behaviours appear?

## A possible turn

A reporting product begins as a dashboard. Treating it as a notebook suggests saved questions and annotations; treating it as a control room suggests live exceptions; treating it as correspondence suggests scheduled narratives. The rendering strategy follows the chosen experience, not the other way around.

## Leave the space open

Offer a few genuinely different possibilities, a sketch, an analogy, or a sharper question when useful. Do not turn every prompt into a scored diagnostic, a completion gate, or a demand for an action plan. The human may choose a direction, combine them, or leave the question open.

Keel can build one selected journey end to end. Wellspring explores state representations; neither requires a certificate from this lens.

## Optional references

Read selectively when a thread needs another perspective or a concrete technique. The notes supply possibilities, examples, and limits; none is a prerequisite or a requirement to close the exploration.

- [Navigate by the experience being proposed](references/decision-tree.md)
- [Different meanings of better](references/objective-function.md)
- [What does the surface promise during uncertainty?](references/perception-contract.md)
- [Use context without inventing the requirement](references/product-sense-and-judgment.md)
- [Authorship and continuity in a frontend](references/source-of-truth-and-consistency.md)
- [Different stories for the same frontend](references/the-membrane.md)