KISS Modularity: Guard Both Cliffs

Size advice usually names one failure mode. Files get too big, so split them. Follow that alone and you land in the other ditch, where the tree has so many files that navigation becomes its own complexity.

This holds both. One coherent concern per unit, where a unit can be a section inside a file rather than always a new file. Size tiers with tunable defaults. A real distinction between bloat and legitimate length, because some files are long for good reasons.

And a responsibility check you run before every edit: state the file's single responsibility in one sentence, and if you cannot, it needs splitting before anything else goes in.

Where this came from

Deliberon is a Windows desktop app that runs a council of AI agents on a hard decision and hands back a Decision Record: dissent preserved, every claim marked as proved, asserted, or estimated.

KISS is the discipline Deliberon's own codebase is held to. This is the part that decides where code goes.

Pay once, it's yours, no subscription. Thirty days of the full council with no account and no card. Runs on your machine with your own model keys.

https://deliberon.com

The rest of my work, organised by material: https://ryan-heltemes.com