Preserve the Boundary Between Personal Method Ownership and Work-Context Application
The personal method predates and outlives any professional engagement. Methodology — principles, reasoning patterns, decision structures — is captured at the principle level and remains the operator's. Work-context execution, refinements, and artifacts belong to the client environment. The distinction preserves both intellectual clarity and professional hygiene.
Capture
The operator independently develops a method for structured reasoning and system design — YY Method Home Edition — and then applies that method within a professional context.
The method and the work-context application must not be conflated.
The method predates this engagement. It will outlast it. Its principles, reasoning patterns, and decision structures belong to the operator personally. The concrete refinements, execution artifacts, and specific implementations developed within the engagement belong to the client environment.
Why
Methodology can remain personal while the actual work performed for the client remains the client's work.
The YY Method provides the thinking structure: the ADR format, the Capture-Why-Why-Not-Commit loop, the freshness boundary discipline, the scar recording practice. These are the operator's tools, brought to the engagement — not developed within it.
What the engagement produces — the specific architecture decisions, the concrete implementation choices, the operational refinements tuned to the client's environment — those belong to the engagement context. They were not produced from the method alone; they were produced by applying the method to the client's specific constraints.
The distinction preserves both intellectual clarity and professional hygiene. The operator is clear about what is theirs. The client is protected from ambiguity about what is theirs. Neither is served by conflation.
Why-Not
Why not treat the entire deployment as personal intellectual property? Concrete work-context refinements belong to the work context. The operator did not develop the specific architecture in isolation — they developed it in response to the client's environment, constraints, and requirements. Claiming personal ownership of work-specific artifacts would not be intellectually honest and would undermine the professional relationship.
Why not suppress the personal method entirely during professional engagements? The method predates and outlives any single engagement. Suppressing it during professional work would deprive the operator of their own tools and would prevent the kind of principled, structured thinking that makes the work valuable. The method is what the operator brings; the engagement is where they apply it.
Commit
Decision: Capture and publish the method at the principle level as a YY Method Home Edition case study, while treating work-context execution, operational refinements, and environment-specific artifacts as belonging to the client environment. The boundary is preserved by design: the case study publishes principles, not implementations.
Confidence: High. This ADR and C4-004 jointly govern how the entire case is written and published.
Timestamp
2026-04-05