Attention as a budget
Design systems differentiate on tokens, components or documentation, and none of those is defensible, because every mature system has all three. Wolf-Rayet is an argument about something else: that attention is a finite resource an interface spends, and that a system can be held to a budget for it mechanically rather than by asking nicely.
The claim
One property, stated so it can be tested rather than admired.
The products this system targets, supervision of AI and of people, live or die on one interface property: the person can find what needs them, fast, because at most one thing in a region is allowed to demand them. No shipping system makes that a mechanical guarantee. Guidance does not count, because every style guide on earth already says to use emphasis sparingly, and every one of them drifts the week after it is written.
Zero demands is a valid and healthy state. Calm is never an error. A supervisor’s success looks like a screen with nothing shouting on it, and a system that cannot express that has misunderstood the job.
Three channels
Attention is spent through three media, not one.
| Channel | What it spends |
|---|---|
| Light | Emitted colour and contrast. The channel every design system already budgets, usually by asking politely. |
| Language | Verbal force. A word can demand as hard as a colour, and no token stops it. |
| Motion | The strongest peripheral bid a screen makes. A system that budgets light and permits arbitrary animation has a hole where its thesis should be. |
One ladder
The three channels share a single five level ladder, because a reduced motion preference collapses the motion channel and any one channel must then carry the whole hierarchy alone.
| Level | Name | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | Substrate | The ground everything else is read against. It asks for nothing. |
| 1 | Ambient | Present and readable, bidding for no attention of its own. |
| 2 | Marked | Distinguished from its neighbours, found when looked for. |
| 3 | Directed | Pointed at. It draws the eye once the reader is in the region. |
| 4 | Demanded | Takes attention whether or not it was wanted. Rationed. |
The ration
What makes it a budget rather than a vocabulary.
Level 4 is rationed: at most one per region, and at most a fixed cap per view. Local rules cannot produce that guarantee. Ten locally correct components still make a screen where everything glows, which is why the ration belongs to the region and has a single owner.
It was deliberately not written as exactly one demand per region. That reading forces manufactured urgency onto calm screens, which is the disease the thesis exists to cure.
The record
Every decision, including the ones that were rejected and why.
There are 144 decision records, 136 of them accepted. Each states its context, the decision, the options rejected and the consequences. The rejected options are the useful part: they are where the argument was actually had.