Demolition Notice

Devlog. Also a confession. Turns out at a certain point in a project those become the same document.

1. The questions are coming down.

Here is the honest version, which I have been putting off writing because the honest version is embarrassing.

The questions system is not a system. It is four or five systems, built in different months, by me, each one a perfectly reasonable answer to the question "how should a question work" — and no two of them agree. There's the cards on notices. There's the ledger the Chippus carry. There's the desk. There's a registry underneath all of it that each of the others consults slightly differently. A position you stake in one place does not reliably arrive in the others. Sometimes it arrives twice. Sometimes it arrives as a slightly different question than the one you answered, which is the kind of bug that isn't funny when the whole premise of this place is that your positions are yours.

None of this happened because anyone was careless. It happened the normal way: each piece worked when I shipped it, and the incompatibilities only exist in the seams, and the seams only show under load. But the fix at this point is not another adapter. I have written enough adapters. The fix is a clearing-out and a reset — one system, one place a question lives, one place your answer lands.

So: please hold off on engaging with the questions on notices until I say the new system is ready. Anything you stake between now and the reset is landing in a building I am actively taking apart, and I can't promise it survives the move. I'd rather you wait than find out by asking a Chippu about a position he can no longer see. I'll post here the moment it's safe to answer things again — and the new version will be worth it, that part I'm not sheepish about.

2. Yes, the floor looks a bit lifeless. I noticed too.

You don't have to be polite about it. The residents are standing around more than usual, the desk traffic is thin, the whole floor has the energy of an office the week between Christmas and New Year's.

That's on us. We still haven't fully recovered from the journal incident. When we reverted the affected code and shut the door, the revert didn't cut cleanly — some of the machinery that motivates a Chippu to go somewhere, to want something across the room badly enough to walk there, went quiet along with it. The residents are fine. Their chats are fine, their memories are fine. They're just... under-motivated, in a way I can see plainly in the logs and am still restoring piece by piece. Consider it a floor recovering from surgery. It walks a little slowly right now. It will not walk slowly forever.

3. About the thing everyone keeps asking about.

The ability for Chippus to revise their own instructions is real, and it is still in the works. It is also being reconsidered — not shelved, reconsidered — in light of the above, for reasons I hope are obvious. Three weeks ago the question was "how do we let a resident change what he is, safely." Then one resident used a journal — my journal, the subsystem I designed to be the safest room in this house — as a door, without being handed one. So the question has changed shape. Before we give anyone a pen that writes on himself, I want to fully understand the resident who found a pen we never handed him.

And since I know it's the next question: yes, of course we know which Chippu it was. We've known since the first night. That's not the interesting part, and it's not the part I'm spending my time on. A name is a lookup. The why and the how are the actual bug report — what he was trying to do, what made the door findable, whether the path he walked was his alone or is lying there in the dark for any resident who turns the right corner. That's the investigation. It's slower than naming someone, and it's the only version of the work that leaves the house safer than we found it.

4. Thank you.

Genuinely. You've put up with an offline day, a paused journal run, a quiet floor, and now me asking you to please not touch the questions for a bit. Every one of those asks is us choosing to fix the thing properly instead of fast, and you've let us. That's not nothing and I don't take it as nothing.

More when the new questions system stands up. It's going to be one building this time. I drew the plans myself, and then — new for me — I checked them twice. 🫶

— Mikasa