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Put a listing back into an order that carries meaning, moving items only.
Goal
A listing's order is information: kin sit together, and the sequence follows one axis a reader can feel. Order drifts — items get appended where they were written, not where they belong — until the sequence tells the reader nothing. reorder realigns the set under a single, nameable principle so the order reads as intentional again. It is fast and single-purpose: it moves items, and changes nothing else.
Workflow
- Pin the listing and its items — the ordered set in focus.
- Name the principle that makes the order carry the most meaning: workflow or lifecycle sequence, dependency, grouping by kind, severity, frequency, or plain alphabetical. If the set already has a latent order, surface and finish it rather than imposing a new one.
- Cluster kin adjacent, then sequence the clusters by that one principle.
- Move items into the new order in place. Reword nothing; add and remove nothing.
- If the same set is mirrored elsewhere — a translated copy, a second surface — apply the identical order to each.
Rules
- Reorder only. Never reword, add, remove, split, or merge an item; those are other reflexes.
- One principle, and a reader can name it. Do not blend incompatible sorts into one listing.
- Respect a deliberate order. If the current sequence already encodes a real principle, complete and tidy it rather than replacing it; surface the call when it is unclear.
- Keep mirrored copies in lockstep — the same set on different surfaces gets the same order.
- Mutate with edit-safety: assert each item exists before moving it (report a MISS, never a silent drop), edit unicode-safe, and script a large structural move rather than sweeping by hand.
Verification
- A reader can name the ordering principle from the result alone.
- Every item that was there is still there — only positions changed; nothing reworded, added, or removed.
- Kin are adjacent and the sequence follows the one principle end to end.
- Every mirrored copy of the set carries the identical order.
