Principle 03 · Learn the north star
People do things. Sometimes knowingly, sometimes not. Those actions serve something, and naming what they serve is most of the work.
The north star principle says a tutor should know what you are ultimately trying to do, and translate the task in front of you into that language. That is easy to say. The hard part is that a person does not have one goal, and the thing they are doing at four in the afternoon rarely announces which goal it belongs to.
So Nester models it as three layers, and then refuses to make them a tree.
North stars. One or several, being a good game designer, improving education, a happy family. They are not exclusive, and they tend to serve each other: a tool that makes design education better also makes you better at design education.
Projects. Voxitect, Asvalin, MONK. An art project counts. Not every project needs a Claude Code repo, if you mention something often enough that it behaves like a project, it should become one, whether or not it has a folder.
And the names will not line up. The repo name, the folder name and the Claude Code session title are three different strings for one thing, and none of them is what you call it out loud. There are also several repos for one project: Voxitect has Voxitect, and VoxMarketing for the marketing side of Voxitect. Nester can hold VoxMarketing as part of Voxitect, or as its own project, and either is fine, in a graph you can say later that they are closely related, or pull one underneath the other. It has to be flexible, because the answer changes as the work does.
The current task. “Increasing the performance of Voxitect.” A day, or several days. Obviously it belongs to Voxitect.
Because that task might also be part of computer graphics research, which is not a repository and is not underneath Voxitect. Things do not need to be this or that. They can be both.
A folder tree cannot hold that. A graph can, and once you accept it the whole model gets simpler: there is a general hierarchical order, work should serve the north star, and the smallest task should be tied as closely to that north star as it honestly can be. Two parents is not a contradiction. It is usually the truth.
MONK: What are you doing?
ME: I'm working on improving the Voxitect graphics.
(Nester, silently)
that is clearly Voxitect.
but there is also a project called "ComputerGraphics Research",
which is not a repository, and several repos already point at it.
worth asking.
MONK: So this is Voxitect. Is it also ComputerGraphics Research?
ME: Yes.
(Nester, silently)
tying it to ComputerGraphics Research.
Voxitect serves "build game-like immersive design tools to improve
design education". ComputerGraphics Research serves it too.
the chain from this task to a north star is now complete.
Nester asks when it is not sure, and it asks with its guess already attached, because “is this also computer graphics research?” is answerable in one word and “which project is this?” makes you do the work.
It asks about three things: what a Claude Code tab is actually about, what a project is ultimately for, and whether something you just mentioned is a project or a north star it should be holding. Everything it records carries its source, so what you said and what MONK inferred never blur together. An inference is drawn as a dashed line on the map and labelled as a guess, and it is the thing MONK offers when it asks, never something it asserts.
A Claude Code tab is not one project. You can be building the Anthropic submission in a tab and adding features to the Vox Video Editor in the same hour, and both are true at the same time. Nester binds a tab to every project it has evidence for, and asks about the ones it cannot name.
This is also why the map matters. Nester draws the graph as a graph, and then translates it to a hierarchy for reading, where an item genuinely does appear under two parents, shown once in full and as a reference everywhere else, with the depth capped so a cycle cannot unroll forever.
Because everything is framing. How you frame a project so that it points at a north star, how you frame the challenge in front of you, how you frame the way it connects to other projects and other tasks, that framing is what turns a pile of work into a life with a direction in it. Defining healthy north stars, and framing projects so they contribute to them, is the part that actually matters.
A tutor that knows the chain can say something better than “you could use subagents here”. It can say why this afternoon is worth your afternoon.