Pattern and Configuration Coupling

A new term for me. Learning is not a linear process. Sometimes the path is not convergent. What is a Digital Garden. At first I asked you-tube. Sounded like a cool shared wiki for whatever chatter is rolling in my head. A way for this dimished ol' geek to keep on task.

Not the type of gardening for me at this time. In my digital garden I am attempting to connect my Solti project with documentation that is usable by the person and the AI. The data is mostly the same, just tailored for the audience. There are a few hard points, like needs to be markdown for the AI of today. It has to be searchable.

So do I go dynamic or static generated. I am testing Bookstack and MkDocs for this task.

A healthy gardern genearly has a strong mycelium layer that connects plants. Meta-data will serve that role. Claude-code has done a good job of documenting and we curating a test to feed that data into ref.tools to lower the cost and improve the quality. Why that tool? Because it is free.

Now comes the good part...how do you segment the garden for security. When you are working is hard to ensure you don't leak things best not leaked. So off to the AI's I go...hi ho, hi ho.

Q

For any software system there are "actions" and "details" in documentation. Not quite a "env var" use pattern, but close. The actions are public part of the document. the details are api keys, network address/route, vpns, other services. Those are private. As I work with the AI there is often a coupling that is hard to catch.

A

You've identified the core problem that plagues infrastructure documentation - the coupling of pattern and configuration.

Your "actions" vs "details" distinction is exactly right - it's like having Ansible roles (the logic) but the inventory/group_vars (the specifics) are embedded in the docs instead of separated. Every time you reference documentation, you're mentally parsing out which parts are "the pattern" vs "this specific customer's network layout."

Yep there is the rub. As your code gets tighter in design there is usually an automated feedback loop where the code converges on the tests. This "vibe coding" thing is cool to watch. I am trying to document the journey, and keeping things private take diligence. network is segmented based on what ever I am testing. Some local and some not.