Editing Openai/693c70a4-9498-8011-87ee-efb5576cc53d (section)

=== Assistant: That’s a very good question, and you’re not “behind” at all. ===
That’s a very good question, and you’re not “behind” at all.
These terms feel confusing because they were not invented by one person, and they come from different eras of software engineering.

I’ll explain who, when, and why, in plain language.

==== ### ====

No single person did.
They emerged gradually from Unix culture, compiler theory, and later CI/CD practices.

Think of them like words such as “road”, “traffic”, “intersection” —
no one invented them in one meeting; they became standard because they were useful.

==== ### ====

In early programming:
* Humans wrote source code
* Machines translated it into something else

So:
* Source = the original human-written input
* Output / artifact = the result of processing

This comes from compiler theory, long before the web existed.

That’s why:
* .c → source
* .o → object file
* executable → artifact

The word “source of truth” came later (1980s–1990s) from database theory:

: 

==== ### ====

When projects got larger, teams noticed:

: 

Examples:
* Java → .jar
* C → binary
* Web → bundled HTML/CSS/JS

They needed a name for:

: 

So:
* Artifact = something produced
* Borrowed from archaeology & manufacturing

This became standard in:
* Make
* Maven
* Gradle
* CI servers (Jenkins, later GitHub Actions)

==== ### ====

src = source

This convention became popular because:
* It was short
* It was clear
* Tools could assume it

Java projects made it mainstream:

<syntaxhighlight>src/
  main/
  test/

</syntaxhighlight>

Then frontend tooling (React, Vue, Angular) copied it.

That’s why you see it everywhere today — not because it’s mandatory, but because tools expect it.

==== That part is not universal, but very logical: ====

|     |     |
| --- | --- |
|     |     |
|     |     |
|     |     |
|     |     |

MkDocs uses site/ by default, so your project naturally inherited it.

So in your case:

<syntaxhighlight>src/   → human-authored
site/  → machine-generated website

</syntaxhighlight>

==== You come from: ====
* Systems thinking
* Infrastructure
* Governance
* Community platforms

In small projects, people often:
* Edit files directly
* Upload them
* “Just make it work”

But CI/CD forces discipline:
* Repeatability
* Auditing
* Rollback
* Proof of origin

That’s why these terms feel abstract — they were created to solve scale and trust problems, not for beginners.

==== Forget the terms for a moment. Use this rule instead: ====

: 

That’s it.

Everything else is just vocabulary layered on top.

==== People who blindly follow tutorials never ask this. ====
Architects and system designers always do.

Your confusion is not a weakness — it’s a sign you’re thinking at the system level, not just “getting it to run”.

If you want, next I can:
* Rewrite these terms into WSI-specific language
* Or give you a one-sentence rulebook you can reuse for all future projects

Just tell me which you prefer.