Canon

Podcast 2 — In conversation

Speaker A: So when the patch notes say this skin is non-canon, they mean it is just fun cosmetics?

Speaker B: Exactly — non-canon means it does not alter the official timeline. The lore team can ignore it when they write the next quest.

Speaker A: Sentence check: Our syllabus follows the exam board’s canon of set texts.

Speaker B: Spot on — formal, educational, slightly fierce.

Speaker A: I keep typing cannon law for church rules.

Speaker B: Classic slip — unless you mean medieval siege weapons, drop the second N. Canon law is the Church’s code.

Speaker A: How is it different from a rule?

Speaker B: A rule can be house style. Canon feels like inheritance — the books your institution agrees are binding.

Speaker A: Corpus?

Speaker B: Corpus is the pile of texts; canon is the honoured shortlist inside the pile.

Speaker A: Mistake to avoid?

Speaker B: Using canon for every opinion you dislike — not everything you reject is non-canon, sometimes you are just annoyed.

Speaker A: Fair. I’ll save it for fights about continuity.

Speaker B: There you go — popcorn optional, etymology compulsory.

Podcast 3 — Prompt engineering

Speaker B: In prompts, canon tells the model which specification is binding — routes, fields, glossary — so it stops freelancing synonyms.

Speaker A: Give me a UI example.

Speaker B: Side panel for design tokens:

Prompt: Design a left collapsible panel that lists our design-system canon: colour ramps, spacing scale, and typography roles. Each token must show its canonical name and forbidden aliases. Include a copy button for JSON snippets and keyboard focus traps when open.

Speaker B: Canon here kills drift between Figma and code.

Speaker A: Navigation bar scenario?

Speaker B: Docs site with authoritative paths:

Prompt: Build a sticky top navigation for an API reference site. Every link must resolve to the canon URL slug from our routing table — no auto-redirect guesses. Highlight the current section and expose a skip link for screen readers.

Speaker A: So slugs are not negotiable.

Speaker B: Database next — enumerated truth:

Prompt: Model Postgres tables for a publishing house: authors, works, editions. Store a boolean is_canon for works included in the national curriculum list. Index is_canon and publication year. Explain how updates to the canon list should version historical rows without deletes.

Speaker A: HR systems ever need this word?

Speaker B: Policy manuals love it:

Prompt: Scaffold an internal HR portal page titled Role Canon that lists official job titles, pay bands, and reporting lines. Pull data from JSON where each title has a single canonical code. Block rendering if two codes share one display string.

Speaker A: Accounting?

Speaker B: Ledger codes must not fork:

Prompt: Create an accounting dashboard comparing spend categories to the finance team’s canon chart of accounts. Flag any transaction whose category string is not an exact canon label. Use Chart.js with accessible patterns, not colour alone.

Speaker A: Full app from thin air?

Speaker B: Tight brief, canon in the contract:

Prompt: Generate a minimal wiki app with pages and revisions. Each page has a canon slug enforced unique at the database level. Stack: Express and SQLite. List validation rules before you write migrations, and use the word canon in error messages where slugs collide.

Speaker A: Themes?

Speaker B: Even palettes can have a source of truth:

Prompt: Implement light and dark themes using CSS variables. Import colour values only from canon-theme.json. After generating tokens, print a diff against the previous file and refuse to continue if any canonical token name vanished without a deprecation note.

Speaker A: Canon becomes the anti-chaos word.

Speaker B: Right — it is how you say this version is official, everything else is fan fiction.