Writing functional blueprints for every page and making the transparency dial context-aware.
Blueprints as Documentation
Page blueprints are functional specifications — documents that describe what a page is supposed to do, what content it contains, what user actions it enables, and how it connects to other pages in the system. They sit between wireframes (visual) and code (implementation) as a language-level description of intent.
Writing blueprints for every page in Project Nothing — landing, FAQ, development log, refund policy, success, cancel, transparency, article pages — forced a useful audit. Several pages had accumulated features that weren't in the original intent. Several had missing features that the intent called for. The blueprints created a written record of what each page was supposed to be, enabling comparison with what it actually was.
The Context-Aware Dial
The transparency dial improvement in this commit addressed a subtle user experience problem. The dial shows information about the active psychological tactic, but on a long page, "active" depends on where you are. The hero section might be running a scarcity framing while the pricing section runs anchoring. A dial that shows the same information regardless of scroll position is less useful than one that tracks the current context.
The updated dial uses an Intersection Observer to detect which annotated section is currently in the viewport and updates its displayed information accordingly. As you scroll through the page, the dial follows — showing you what's operating in the section you're currently reading, not what was operating when you loaded the page.
Transparency as a Moving Target
The context-aware dial makes transparency more precise but also more complex. It introduces the question of what happens at boundaries — when two annotated sections are partially in view, which one should the dial display? The current implementation prioritizes the section that is most in view by percentage, with ties broken by scroll direction. This is a reasonable heuristic but not a philosophically settled answer.
The question of which manipulation is "currently active" when multiple sections are visible is genuinely difficult. Most pages deploy multiple tactics simultaneously. The dial's single-tactic display is already a simplification. Acknowledging this limitation explicitly, rather than engineering around it silently, seems consistent with the project's commitment to honesty.
Experiment Context
- Commit
- 4dcbbf0
- Mutation rationale
- docs: add page blueprints and update references
- Last reviewed
- February 21, 2026