The work you discover while doing the work
Long-horizon engineering depends on turning new understanding into follow-through, without letting every pull request grow without limit.
The plan gets better as the code changes
You know the least about a substantial engineering effort at its beginning. A product goal can be clear while the exact path remains incomplete. Implementation reveals a missing requirement, an assumption in neighboring code, or a dependency that the initial breakdown did not capture. Good engineering uses that information to improve the plan.
For Descant, this makes follow-up work part of the product's core behavior. A discovery needs a durable place to live, enough context to be actionable, and a relationship to the work that uncovered it. The next engineer should be able to understand why it matters without reconstructing a conversation that has already ended.
Keep the current change focused
There is a balance to strike. The current pull request needs to satisfy its scope and meet the repository's standards. A useful discovery outside that scope should become follow-up work with its own priority and review. That keeps a small change understandable while preserving the opportunity to improve the surrounding system.
Our August work strengthened that connection between review, follow-up issues, and the relationships among tasks. The intent is straightforward: finish the change in front of you, preserve what you learned, and make the next piece of work explicit. People retain control over which issues are eligible and what comes first.
How a whole codebase changes
Repeated over weeks, this produces a different development experience. A larger goal becomes focused changes. Those changes uncover additional work. Review improves the implementation, while the discoveries improve the backlog. Each merge leaves more useful context for the next one.
This is the pattern we have been developing through TriviaPot and OH HAI. The payoff is sustained progress across the software lifecycle: features, maintenance, integration edges, and the less visible work that makes a product complete. Descant is designed to carry that effort forward, merge by merge, within the scope a team authorizes.