Paper is better than code for the sitting itself#

It is faster, it never crashes, and nothing about a five-minute tick needs a database.

So this is not a lecture about upgrading. It is about the one thing paper cannot do.

Why not just use a timer app#

Because the entire category measures input.

A pomodoro app records that you sat there for twenty-five minutes and has no opinion about whether anything came out of it. Nine months of honest logging left me able to tell you one thing about myself: a duration.

The verdict — did this sitting achieve the thing I said it would — is the only field in the whole system that touches output, and no timer asks for it.

Two hundred verdicts is a shape#

So: store the verdicts, derive everything else#

If the rating is a stored number, you will eventually have a stale one.

If it is recomputed from an ordered list of wins and losses, then re-judging a sitting from six weeks ago correctly redraws the whole history.

The worked example, and what it is faithful to#

Ten tiers. A hundred points per division. Placements that can only gain.

A hidden rating whose lead or lag drives how much one result swings you.

Drops gated behind a game taken at zero, and protection for a few games after a promotion.

One house rule: length picks the mode#

It exists to answer the objection twenty minutes isn’t enough to do anything.

• Under ten minutes — a remake. Somebody went offline, the game never counted, it touches nothing.
• Ten to twenty-five — casual, at half the swing.
• Twenty-five and up — ranked, full swing.

Suddenly a twenty-minute gap in your day is a thing you can do something with.

No decay#

Real ladders take points off you for not playing.

This one never does.

A mechanism whose job is to survive your bad weeks cannot have a rule that punishes you for having one — on its own initiative, while you are not even looking at it.

No win-streak bonus#

Undocumented in the original, and tier-dependent.

It would add noise to a curve whose whole job is to be legible.

Nothing pops up when you stop#

No summary card. No score screen. No in-session checklist panel.

Those were built and then cut, because they made studying feel like a performance of studying.

Assessment 1 demonstrations#

Second half of the session. About six minutes each.

Paper or coded — both are fully marked, and a paper system in daily use marks better than a half-finished program.

Bring it in whatever state it is actually in.