The record needs a front door

The experiment pages were asking readers to do the editor’s job. A page could begin with a migration notice, continue through a file inventory, and only later reach the question that made the work worth doing. Preserving the record was useful. Presenting that preservation as an introduction made the work difficult to enter.

The new pages have a front door: the question, the idea under test, the finding, and the limit on that finding. The original methods, predictions, saved analysis and dated log remain underneath, in expandable sections. A short guide explains the ants and the recurring terms without assuming a reader knows what boundary occupation means.

The distinction matters most when an experiment did not deliver a clean answer. The growth-clock test failed its support gate, so its introduction should say that the planned effect was not estimated. The loop-surgery page describes a test that was deliberately never run. Neither deserves a confident result-shaped story just because the page has a slot for findings.

Figures need the same editorial care. The late-switch figure gives a reader something specific to inspect: the cost of a new cell changes, the wake repeats, the trajectory sweeps. That is a stronger invitation than a directory of outputs. It still does not reveal what triggers the transition.

There is a risk in this change: a short introduction can make a messy history look settled. The safeguard is to preserve failed predictions, identify pilots and descriptive archives, and keep the evidence and reproduction recipe close to the prose. Some older folders still support only a modest descriptive guide. Giving those an attractive page is not a substitute for reconstructing their scientific argument.

These introductions are retrospective summaries, not replacements for the timestamped predictions. The publishing step selects saved figures and renders saved notebooks; it runs no new scientific analysis. Authoring details live in the blog guide.