TFA mentions “Notes on the Synthesis of Form” by Christopher Alexander but doesn't really do the book justice: "things get exponentially easier if you take prob

TFA mentions “Notes on the Synthesis of Form” by Christopher Alexander but doesn't really do the book justice: "things get exponentially easier if you take problems one piece at a time". That's sort of what the book says but it's missing the critical part. The whole book is about how to split the solution space into pieces that can be taken "one piece at a time", as it's obviously not the case that just any split will do. It goes through some real world examples of design and goes on to build a more general semi-formal theory of design, components and independence.