Chord Design and Development

After the first pass at designing Chord, I followed the same step as I did with Sharpee. I worked with Claude to build first an Author's Guide, then documentation for the Standard Library.

The first document used Family Zoo as its spine and although we found a few issues, it was completed in a day.

That second document blew up everything, but part of that was Claude blundering on what it meant to do an audit. Sometimes Claude seems to "model-down" and although there is no public evidence of this happening, the responses tell a different story. I set it aside and slept on the problem.

I came back today and got the correct audit prompt from Gemini.

The issues include:

• The current port of Dungeon from the original 1981 MDL source should pass a clean audit outside of the gnomes, which I intentionally removed.
• Chord and Sharpee must align on IF capabilities 100%
• Non-IF puzzles or concepts require a hatch from Chord to either Sharpee or Typescript.
• Changes to Sharpee and Chord must retain their own elegance.
• A port of 1981 MDL Dungeon to Chord must at least pass a "reasonably achievable" gate. I may not work on the Chord Dungeon implementation now, but Chord must support the goal.

Chord has its own set of directives as does Sharpee. Those must be maintained or discussed to keep both the API and the Chord language elegant and usable, though Chord is a pseudo-code mirror of Sharpee.

It's clear this will end up bumping Sharpee to 3.0 with Chord 1.0 as its partner authoring language. The MacOS IDE may also be delivered as a part of 3.0.