Small on purpose
Two packages with a defended boundary need a shared idea of where the boundary is. That idea does not survive being distributed across a large group; it turns into a document nobody reads and then into a boundary nobody enforces.
How work is divided
By family, not by layer. Whoever builds an accordion builds its markup, its recipe, its runtime, its stories, its tests and its documentation. There is no handoff between “the component” and “the styles” because they are the same decision.
Review is adversarial on purpose
A second reader’s job is to try to refute a change, not to approve it. The most useful reviews on this project have been the ones that took a decision already made and reached it again independently — or failed to, which is more useful still.
Two reviewers agreeing after arriving separately is worth more than either one alone, and it is the only check available for decisions no test can fail.
What we do not do
Estimates against a calendar. The work is verification-bound, not implementation-bound: writing a component takes an afternoon and proving it behaves at 320 pixels, at 200% zoom, under forced colours, in right-to-left, and without JavaScript takes considerably longer.