Reinforce what carries value. Let the rest decay. Route around the break — and keep it.
→ the full spine: essays, program, argumentWhen one abstraction shows up in two unrelated security problems, that is the evidence it is real. Both instruments run the identical three-state discipline — reinforce what carries value, let the rest decay, route around the break. One does it to tools. One does it to dependency graphs, the way a slime mold does it to a rail map.
A fragility-aware toolbelt for a research harness. Tools are expected to eject under load; the breaker trips on a soft threshold, the portable task context hands off to the next tool intact, and the eject-reason taxonomy is kept as the research payload.
Routing ranks tools by value-density — goal advanced per token — never by reliability. Ejection is never penalized anywhere in the code.
→ the formal argument (PDF)Feed a dependency graph as terrain. The organism treats roots as food sources and lays tubes between them, thickening the paths that carry flux and starving the ones that don't — converging on a minimal set of roots whose trail covers the most surface. That set is the upgrade ritual.
It is the same fragility, applied to a different graph. Physarum polycephalum famously rebuilt the Tokyo rail network this way — reinforce what works, prune what doesn't (Tero et al., Science, 2010).
→ repos at github.com/mazze93