I'm definitely not trying to defend the stickers, nor do I feel that taking this argument to its ultimate point retains any logic. My argument is that colors an

I'm definitely not trying to defend the stickers, nor do I feel that taking this argument to its ultimate point retains any logic. My argument is that colors and tags are both potentially misleading, while the actual information and structure comes out of their connectivity diagram. Any time you put trust in anything else you're trading off safety for convenience. That isn't a bad thing, but it's a tradeoff that should be done conscientiously. Finally, I think it's illustrative to think about what would happen without HN (or, in analogy, without colored wires or little tags) because that drives you to solve the harder problem of how to represent the connectivity diagram of a breadboard directly, expressively, and in a way that solves the problems people face when building them. Analysis trumps documentation, except when it doesn't or is too expensive.