What are the Judgment Axes (Memo Types)
PaPut treats memos not as a pile of knowledge, but along four "judgment axes (memo types)." As AI becomes ubiquitous, the value of technical knowledge (knowledge) that anyone can look up becomes a commodity. What lasts is "how you judged, how you operated, and what you consistently valued." PaPut classifies knowledge along these judgment axes and focuses on accumulating and visualizing their thickness.
The four memo types
A memo can carry more than one judgment axis at the same time.
decision
Why you chose it and what you avoided — the reasons for adoption and the rejected alternatives. A memo like "Chose B over A because…, and passed on C because…" that records the basis of a judgment.
operation
How you operate, how you verify, and what you observe. How you apply tests, how you choose eval (evaluation) metrics and thresholds, what you monitor in production and where you send alerts — memos about how the work is actually run. This is the scarcest and most durable axis.
principle
A consistent stance abstracted one level above individual decisions. A posture that runs through many judgments, such as "optimize for X and accept Y." It rarely emerges from a single conversation; it can only be articulated by looking across accumulated judgments. It is the scarcest axis and the most likely to endure in the age of AI.
knowledge
Technical knowledge and know-how reusable across other projects. Useful, but the axis most likely to become a commodity as AI spreads.
Where the judgment axes matter
The judgment axes are a shared idea that runs across much of PaPut's MCP functionality.
- Capturing knowledge:
paput-capture/paput-harvestclassify each candidate along these axes. Rather than defaulting to knowledge, they consider decision / operation / principle first - Analyzing your current position: The dashboard current-position analysis reads your position from the thickness of the judgment axes (decision / operation / principle), not from memo counts or category ratios
- Synthesizing principles: Principle synthesis reads across accumulated decision / operation memos to derive the principles that run through many judgments