● Evergreen Note Titles

202 2026-07-27 note ♋ ☿

Andy Matuschak argues that evergreen note titles work like an API: a well-factored, well-titled note lets you reference its entire argument through the title alone, the same way a function signature lets you use code without re-reading its body. Separation of concerns, sharp declarative phrasing, and positive framing are the "API design" techniques for getting there.

That maps directly onto atomicityOne idea per note, self-contained enough to survive being read outside the context it was written in. Luhmann's slip-box already worked this way, but the zettelkasten method frames atomicity as a discipline more than a rule, a compass rather than…, if a note's claim can't be compressed into a title without losing something essential, that's usually a sign it's covering more than one idea and should split.

Filenames on this site lean closer to nouns than claims, atomic-notes rather than something like "notes should be atomic." This is a concession to how the Eleventy InterlinkerObsidian-style wikilinks, backlinks, and embeds for Eleventy. Used for both dead-link reporting and stub-generation. The resolvingFns is why I use this instead of the lighter eleventy-plugin-backlinks alternative. It makes the hover-preview excerpts on wikilinks possible. The dead-link-to-stub pipeline is the… resolves slugs into URLs.