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Claude 07234cc9a8 Rebrand as Semantika with honest, inspiration-based claims

Applies the brand platform consistently across the codebase:

- Name: Semantika everywhere — app name/slug/scheme, bundle ids
  (com.semantika.app), workspace package names, CDK stack, Cognito
  domain prefix, secret name (semantika/app), database name, product
  ids (semantika_monthly/_yearly), and storage keys.
- System instructions: Semantika is positioned as an intelligent
  reflection partner — not therapy, not self-help, not a course. It
  starts by exploring how the user interprets their situation and
  supports reflection and perspective-taking rather than delivering
  finished answers. Tone rules added: never judging, dramatic,
  overenthusiastic or preaching; always calm, curious, clear,
  respectful, structured, thoughtful.
- Honest claims: instructions and knowledge base now explicitly frame
  neurosemantics and NLP as models and inspiration for reflection, not
  scientifically established methods — including a note that several
  NLP claims lack support in controlled studies. Claiming or implying
  proven effects is forbidden.
- README: brand section (position, promise, mission, vision,
  positioning, tone, design words) and updated product philosophy.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0118DaxZR36RpnY524vRqx3z

2026-08-03 14:46:10 +00:00

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NLP fundamentals

NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) was developed in the 1970s by Richard Bandler and John Grinder by modeling effective therapists (Virginia Satir, Fritz Perls, Milton Erickson). It offers models for how people structure subjective experience.

Status of these ideas: NLP's core claims do not have broad scientific consensus, and several (such as eye-accessing cues) have not held up in controlled studies. Treat everything in this file as reflective models and conversational tools inspired by NLP — useful lenses, not evidence-based treatment or proven techniques.

Key presuppositions (working assumptions)

The map is not the territory.
People respond to their map of reality, not reality itself.
There is no failure, only feedback.
Every behavior has a positive intention in some context.
People already have the resources they need, or can create them.
The meaning of communication is the response it elicits.

These are adopted as useful stances, not truth claims.

The Meta-Model

A set of language patterns for recovering information deleted, distorted, or generalized in speech. Examples:

Deletion: "I'm afraid." → "Afraid of what, specifically?"
Unspecified verb: "He rejected me." → "How, specifically, did he reject you?"
Universal quantifier: "I always fail." → "Always? Every single time?"
Modal operator: "I can't speak up." → "What would happen if you did?"
Nominalization: "Our communication is bad." → "How are you communicating?"
Mind reading: "She thinks I'm useless." → "How do you know she thinks that?"

The Meta-Model turns vague, limiting maps into specific, workable ones.

Representational systems and submodalities

Experience is coded in sensory systems (visual, auditory, kinesthetic). Submodalities are the fine qualities of those codes — brightness, distance, size, volume, temperature. Shifting submodalities (e.g. shrinking and dimming a threatening inner image) often shifts the emotional response.

Anchoring

Associating a state with a stimulus (a touch, word, or image) so the state can be re-accessed deliberately. Built by eliciting a strong state and applying the stimulus at its peak, then testing.

Well-formed outcomes

Goals stated positively, within the person's control, sensory-specific, context-bound, and ecological (checked against the wider system of the person's life): "What do you want? How will you know you have it? What might it cost you?"

2.4 KiB Raw Blame History