A warning against naming. The moment you attach a name, the essence is diluted.
※ Interpretations of Chapter 1 of the Tao Te Ching vary among scholars. The reading applied here follows a widely accepted general interpretation, offered to minimize potential misunderstanding.
And yet, in 26 years of software projects, I witnessed the exact opposite problem.
Things that couldn't exist because they had no name.
Trapped in Separate Languages
There is one software feature. The login screen.
Every person on the team calls it something different.
Meetings go sideways because everyone uses a different name. Test results require a developer to translate before planners can read them. When an incident occurs, tracing which feature caused it takes hours.
This is why it's not a technology problem. The technology was always there. There was no shared name.
The Moment of Naming
LOGIN-001
What happens the moment this single name is assigned?
The silos collapse.
People who were trapped in separate languages are now connected by a single name. The developer's code, the planner's document, QA's test cases, the ops team's incident log — all of it gathers under LOGIN-001.
In software, naming is not dilution of essence.
It is a declaration of existence.
Making the Invisible Tangible
Software is invisible by nature.
Manufacturing parts can be held. They have weight, color, a location you can point to. Assigning a part number feels natural.
Software is different. Nobody can physically point to where "the login screen" actually is. In the server? In the code? In the database? In the user's browser?
Because it was invisible, naming felt awkward. Without names, it couldn't be managed. Without management, history disappeared.
Once named, it becomes inventory. It acquires history. Conversation becomes possible. History becomes traceable. It becomes something that can be managed.
What manufacturing did with part numbers — SOM does with SOM IDs.
SOM Tree — The Living Shape of Named Things
When named things accumulate, what do you see?
You see a tree.
🌳 Project
/ \
🌿 Auth Module 🌿 Order Module
/ \ \
🍎 LOGIN 🍎 SIGNUP 🍎 ORDER
-001 -002 -003
The root is the project. The trunk is the module. The branches are feature areas. Each piece of fruit is a SOM ID.
The color of the fruit signals quality status. Green fruit: verified. Dark fruit: not yet verified. Damaged fruit: known defect.
Looking at the whole tree — you can see at a glance which branch has the most problems. Click on a single piece of fruit — and everything connected to that SOM ID unfolds: the spec, the code, the test results, the defect history, the deployment record.
Hierarchy (vertical) · Process (radial) · Time (depth) — three axes converging on a single SOM ID.
Software that was once invisible — made real through naming, alive in the shape of a tree.
A Closing Thought
Laozi warned against naming. That insight runs deep.
But in 26 years in the field, I witnessed something else.
Things that couldn't exist without a name. People who couldn't connect without a name. Histories that vanished without a name.
Naming was the liberation.
Planners, developers, QA engineers, and operations staff — each trapped in their own language — look at LOGIN-001 and for the first time, they are seeing the same thing.
That is the answer SOM found, after a very long time.
And it is reborn — as a tree.... (To be continued in the next episode)