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A fictional example corpus that ships with the kit. Yours stays private. This is the worked example for the persona Sam Rivers, rendered read-only from examples/sam-rivers/ so you can see a whole life stack before you write your own.

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Living example · Reflections

examples/sam-rivers/reflections/evidence/2026-02-15-jam-game-shipped.md

type
proud
date
2026-02-15
domain
work
related
[principle:ship-before-its-ready]
FICTIONAL EXAMPLE — not a real person, not real corpus. Part of the examples/ worked corpus (persona: Sam Rivers). See examples/README.md.

Shipped the jam build with placeholder art

What happened

A 48-hour game jam ended Sunday at 6pm. By Saturday night I had a working core loop and an ugly, programmer-art menu. The old me would have skipped sleep to make the menu pretty and submitted at the deadline with no time to spare. Instead I posted the rough build Saturday night and spent Sunday watching two strangers play it on a stream. They both ignored the mechanic I was proudest of and latched onto a throwaway one. I swapped which was central by Sunday afternoon and submitted a better game than the "polished" version would have been.

What it reveals

A hypothesis, not a conclusion: that for me, real players earlier beats more polish later — and that my instinct to perfect before exposing is usually fear wearing the costume of craft. This is the instance the ship-before-its-ready principle is built on.

Run it yourself

See the same report on your own machine.

Everything here is generated from plain markdown. Clone the template and run the weekly coherence report over this exact example corpus before you tell the system anything about yourself.

python scripts/coherence.py examples/sam-rivers
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