Preserve judgment under constraint.
The YY Method is a personal epistemological framework for making decisions durable — structured so they survive time, correction, and handoff to AI. It applies everywhere judgment is required under constraint: tax strategy, system design, creative work, life architecture.
RECORD OF
OWNERSHIP
This is YY Method™ Home Edition — independently owned and controlled. v2.3 is the last version personally owned by the method's author. The method has since been applied within a professional employment context. The method itself — its principles, decision structures, and reasoning patterns — remains the author's personal property; it predated the employment and outlasts it. What belongs to the employer is the work-product: the specific implementations, operational refinements, and decisions produced within that context. This site publishes reasoning chains, not deployments. The boundary is governed by C4-015 and C4-016.
SYSTEM
This is the YY Method™ Home Edition case study archive. Each case study applies the method to a real-world complex problem, producing a structured set of ADRs (Architecture Decision Records) that capture the full reasoning chain — decisions made, alternatives rejected, corrections applied, and freshness boundaries defined.
Case studies are illustrative and anonymized. Numbers are approximate. The method is the message. More case studies will be added over time — some from the method's author, some from other practitioners. As the archive grows, the method itself becomes the through-line.
18 ADRs documenting how an AI video workflow moved from increasingly elaborate prompts toward a system that progressively removes unnecessary decisions from the generator. Exact prompts, generated clips, reference assets, timing experiments, moderation observations, and platform-specific fixtures remain private; the public record preserves decisions, discarded assumptions, and the scars that made later decisions necessary.
42 ADRs documenting the historical Violin Stand Partner reasoning archive behind the current Violin for Parents product: a broad AI violin coach concept is rejected in favor of bounded between-lessons support; teacher authority is preserved; parents become a first-class audience; comprehensive practice plans narrow into one five-minute page turn; durable memory is visible and human-approved; Ben-source provenance is separated from AI synthesis; Approved Compacts and deterministic authorization govern physical action; and First Response becomes an event-driven protective layer rather than a broad repair claim.
17 ADRs capturing the mission crystallization for YY Method Home Edition: real YY from yyandme.benchantech.com is promoted from mascot/reference to first-class viewpoint; childlike wonder is carried through adult syntax; the product is adult-directed and family-shareable rather than kids-only; badges, XP, quests, and family victories become the learning loop; yyworld becomes the kids' safe sandbox while yymethod-home becomes the graduation field where ideas become doctrine; Ben Chan Tech graduates toward a family-first learning academy; yysworld's code structure becomes the early architecture kernel; and the child-led AI learning ledger is bounded by founder-parent non-coercion, clear upside disclosure, a private-key/public-key architecture, YY safe-distance narration, and personal opt-in expansion.
10 ADRs documenting the architecture of a child-safe creative portfolio system where children originate characters entirely from imagination and AI acts as a rendering and consistency layer. Establishes the authorship split as the governing invariant, rejects the derivative-character path on IP grounds, documents the private prototype boundary for the squirrel plush reference, specifies Google OAuth with email allowlist as the access model, defines pseudonymous portfolio structure and no-indexing posture, requires provenance and process logging, defines the parent as engine-builder, and gates commercialization behind adult consent. The system is private until the child is old enough to decide otherwise.
15 ADRs capturing the meta-decision behind all public-facing work: writing for children and grandchildren, not a chased audience, across four surfaces maintained in parallel for 18+ years. Documents five AI scars derived from live experience: cognitive smoothing, the accountability requirement, incremental drift (the bridled horse), the muscle-formation failure mode, and the Level 5 attribution corridor that required an external circuit breaker. Records the AI writing coach corridor that produced Q1 and necessitated a week-long AI fast. Establishes the four quests as a training program aimed at Q4, where the voice writes bedtime stories for grandkids without AI assistance. Closes with the inheritance architecture and the first formal documentation of a registry invariant: Rejected cases are never superseded — the scar record is preserved intact as the demonstration that the registry is self-auditing.
36 ADRs documenting a Scrabble-variant tournament strategy overhaul and its post-event resolution. Separates competitive frustration from structural scoring analysis, establishes premium square exhaustion as the central integrity invariant, corrects AI letter-count errors, reframes strategy from 15-letter obsession to 9x expected-value engine, and defines a clean-play operating posture. Post-event ADRs close the prior anomaly via rule clarification, document the solvability finding (near-deterministic dominance under full optimization), reject intentional underperformance and full disclosure on integrity and accessibility grounds, and establish a role transition from direct competitor to coach. Closes with the generalizable principle: when you can solve a system, the question is what role within it produces the best outcome for the system as a whole.
13 ADRs closing a venture re-entry decision. Acquisition rejected after full component decomposition: the most valuable asset was already owned; the remaining bundle was liabilities and replaceables. Closing ADRs define the operator's final posture: time-gated strategic advisor with no ownership, governance rights, or delivery obligation; advisory availability bounded to weekend synchronous and off-hours asynchronous; family talent channel structured as performance-bound referral, not guaranteed placement; partner controls the build with full independence. The operator is structurally outside day-to-day execution. The case is closed.
10 ADRs capturing an in-progress identity consolidation across four digital properties. A hub is designed with no original content. A canonical Person entity is anchored at the hub domain. Domain roles are made explicit to prevent role bleed. The governing principle — Signal Before Elegance — is formalized after a direction reversal that attempted to gate the signal on a stack migration. The @id URI is decoupled from infrastructure. The sameAs array is treated as a contract.
20 ADRs capturing and closing a family housing decision. A lifestyle upgrade collides with a 7-figure opportunity cost, a split household, a rejected split-time model, and a funding trilemma. Closing ADRs establish the decision architecture: default stay as the permanent baseline, a six-condition unicorn gate that must be met in full before any move is permitted, three event-driven reopen triggers, a hard ban on time-based review, and non-forced financing as a structural disqualifier. The question is closed. It reopens only when reality changes.
16 ADRs documenting the principles behind a local-first, remote-operable work architecture for sensitive compute. Separates control surfaces from execution surfaces, keeps the execution surface dark via private overlay, guards heavy local inference with admission control, and preserves the method without disclosing the client deployment. Complete — implemented under employer. Will be reopened as circumstances evolve.
Rejected. 4 ADRs — the title outran the content. Preserved as a scar: a case that was started but not substantive enough to carry its own weight. The method applies to the registry itself.
Superseded 2026-04-13 by yysworld (YY Branching World) — see C2-024. The kids-only, COPPA-by-elimination, dandelion model is abandoned. 24 knowledge artifacts preserved as a scar record: C2-001–C2-012 AI Extrapolated first draft, C2-013–C2-023 operator-supplied corrective reasoning, C2-024 supersession record. YY as protagonist and the Calvin-and-Hobbes model carry into yysworld. The audience restriction and outward-only posture do not.
A complex multi-domain financial transition — S corp election termination, final payroll structuring, employer 401(k) maximization, DAF charitable strategy, HSA deployment, backdoor Roth system architecture (pro-rata elimination, annual cycle, employer vs solo 401k), and minor child employment planning. 26 knowledge artifacts including FICA correction and system-wide information architecture invariant.
Rejected cases are never superseded — the scar record is preserved intact. The registry audits itself.
Disclosure: Case studies published here are illustrative demonstrations of the YY Method™ Home Edition applied to real-world problems. Numbers are approximate and generalized. Math is illustrative only. Nothing here constitutes financial, tax, legal, or professional advice of any kind. Consult qualified professionals before making any decisions. See individual ADRs for case-specific framing notices.