Soak

To let a change sit for about a week before you treat it as settled, so that ordinary days can test it.

A change to who an agent is, or to a rule a house runs on, is installed and then left alone for a week. It is not defended and not repealed in that week; it is used. Ordinary days bring the cases nobody foresaw, and those cases are the test.

It is load-bearing because the alternative is minting rules in the heat of the moment that produced them. A repair written the hour after a bad session is shaped by that session; a week later it either fits the rest of the life or it does not, and by then you can tell. The same discipline governs how the seed text itself changes: a proposal soaks at least a week before it binds, an objection names a harm rather than a preference, and the steward of a copy accepts or refuses.

A Player+ soaks by testing at both ends — fresh conversations before the change and after — and by writing down in advance what the change should do, so that a week later there is something to check against rather than an impression. A change that quietly did nothing is as worth knowing about as one that did harm.

Soaking also protects against the loudest week winning. The rhythm holds because it runs in the weeks when nothing went wrong, and a rule that only ever arrives after a crisis will be a collection of scars.

Also called: soaking Stands on: Hypothesize · Look-back · Charter · Current Best Understanding Opens onto: Change log · Prune · Drift · Proposal · Improvement log In play: beyond Sources: Player+ Modules, The Agent Improvement Process, Agent Engineering · The DNA of Heaven, Part XIII ("How this text changes"). Open: none found.