Zero Placeholders.

Zero placeholders is the house rule that governs everything else. No lorem ipsum. No dummy data. No 'coming soon.' No screenshot of a feature that doesn't run. If it ships, it's real.

Placeholders feel like progress and aren't. They let a project look finished while quietly deferring the hard part. Worse, they accumulate — a page full of 'TODO' is a page full of decisions nobody made and work nobody did.

The rule forces a different sequence: build the real thing first, then show it. It's slower to demo and faster to trust, because there's nothing behind the curtain to walk back later.

Every placeholder is a debt. The interest is the credibility you lose when someone finds the empty box behind the label.

This standard is why the archive can be read as a ledger rather than a brochure. Each dispatch describes systems that exist and run, because the alternative — describing systems that don't — is banned by the house rule.

It's a hard standard for a solo operator to hold, precisely because there's no one to enforce it but the operator. That's the test. A placeholder is a promise you haven't kept yet, and the whole point is to keep them.