NODEPROMPT 26.04.15

NODEPROMPT Update Catalog

26.04.15 update

The six node types are now the six transcendentals

NodePrompt's six node types used to be pragmatic labels — concept / nuance / mood / philosophy / abstraction / context — picked to cover what a prompt contained. They worked, but they were a flat list: six buckets sitting side by side, with no reason why these six and not some other five or seven. This release replaces them with a set that has a reason: the six transcendentia Thomas Aquinas lays out in De Veritate q.1 a.1 — ens, res, unum, aliquid, verum, bonum.

The visual language stays exactly the same. The six patterns (solid, crosshatch, vertical, horizontal, diagonal, dots) are untouched; only what they mean has shifted. What was a taxonomy is now a metaphysics.

Why the transcendentals

Aquinas is not cataloguing kinds of being. He is asking: what can be said of any being as being, before we divide it into categories? His answer is that every being, simply in so far as it is, can be read through six convertible registers:

Latin — UI	Meaning	The question it asks
ens — Being	id quod est — what is posited as being	What does this prompt posit as existing?
res — Essence	quod habet quidditatem — what has a whatness	What is it, as a formal structure?
unum — Unity	ens indivisum — being as undivided in itself	What holds it together as one?
aliquid — Difference	aliud-quid — other-than-other	What distinguishes it from what it is not?
verum — Truth	ens ut cognoscibile — being as knowable to intellect	How is it true to a knower?
bonum — Value	ens ut appetibile — being as desirable to will	How is it desirable to a will?

These six are not six kinds of being but six aspects of the same being — convertibilia cum ente, convertible with being itself. To call something ens and to call it unum is to name the same thing from two different angles: once as existing, once as held together. The six angles are exhaustive in the scholastic sense — if a prompt has any content at all, it can be read through every one of them.

What this changes for a prompt

The old types asked, roughly, what kind of thing is this node? Concept, nuance, mood. The new types ask through which register is this node being read? The same sentence — "the model should be cautious about extrapolation" — can legitimately surface as:

• an ens node (the referent: the model, extrapolation),
• a res node (the structure: caution as a policy constraint),
• a verum node (the epistemic claim: extrapolation is unreliable),
• or a bonum node (the affective posture: carefulness as a value).

None of those readings is wrong. They are six lenses, and the graph becomes richer when a prompt is read through more than one of them. The extraction prompts have been rewritten so the model is asked, explicitly, not to collapse everything into ens — the old "concept" bucket was a strong attractor, and the new prompts name that as an anti-pattern.

First-draft mapping from the old types

For continuity, the closest first-draft correspondence between the retired labels and the transcendentals is:

Old (retired)	New	Why this mapping
concept	ens	Both name the referent — what the prompt posits as existing.
abstraction	res	Formal structure, mechanism, quidditas — the "what it is" of a thing.
context	unum	The unifying frame that holds the situation together as one.
nuance	aliquid	Difference, subtext — aliud-quid, the "other-than" that distinguishes.
philosophy	verum	Worldviews, epistemic commitments — the register of being as knowable.
mood	bonum	Affective charge, values — being as desirable to the will.

This is a first-draft mapping, not an identity. The point of the new scheme is precisely that a single sentence can pass through several registers at once, which the old one-type-per-node framing discouraged.

Pattern continuity

No visual assets were replaced. The canvas patterns drawn for each type — solid black for ens, crosshatch for res, vertical stripes for unum, horizontal stripes for aliquid, diagonals for verum, dots for bonum — keep their shapes; only their keys were renamed. An existing Lombardi-style graph looks identical after the upgrade.

The pattern-to-meaning alignment was chosen to be semantically honest rather than arbitrary:

• ens gets solid black — the densest, most foundational fill, matching id quod est.
• res gets crosshatch — formal structure of quidditas, two axes of definition intersecting.
• unum gets vertical stripes — ens indivisum, the thing held as one column.
• aliquid gets horizontal stripes — discrete lines marking difference and division.
• verum gets diagonals — rays of truth, the classical image for intellectual light.
• bonum gets scattered dots — the lightest, most dispersed pattern, ens ut appetibile.

Help overlay

The ? overlay has been extended with a full transcendentia section below the existing two-column reference. It renders the Latin name, the Korean / English UI label, the meaning, the question each type asks, and the first-draft mapping from the retired labels — the same table shown above, as live UI, so a user does not need to open a README to learn the six registers.

Extraction and response synthesis

The scaffold / fill / validate passes and the four-pass hierarchical extraction have all had their dimension definitions rewritten. The model now sees, for each of the six types: the Latin name and its scholastic definition, the question the register asks, a good example and a bad example, and an explicit instruction that ens is not a default fallback. Few-shot examples and anti-patterns were updated in lock-step so the model is not silently trained toward the old label set.

The response-synthesis path was updated too. Edited graphs are now serialized with the transcendental type tag alongside label / weight / abstraction level, and the generation system prompt teaches the answering model how to honor each register: verum nodes shape the argumentative premise, bonum nodes shape tone and affect, aliquid nodes surface what must be qualified, unum nodes define scope, res nodes drive definitional content, and ens nodes are the referents the answer is about. The register is instruction for the answering model, not content for the reader — the final answer never surfaces raw type tags.

No data migration

NodePrompt has never persisted graphs across sessions — every prompt is extracted fresh — so there is no stored data to migrate. A user upgrading their build opens NodePrompt and immediately sees the new registers in the type selector, the help overlay, and the editing panels. No keys to re-enter, no storage to clear.

Notes

• The six pattern textures are unchanged; only the keys that index them were renamed. Existing screenshots and documentation images remain visually accurate.
• Schemas (NODE_TYPES enum, Zod validators, tool-use JSON Schemas) have been updated across all six LLM adapters introduced in 26.04.14 (Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, xAI, DeepSeek, Qwen). Structured output enforcement works the same way; only the enum values changed.
• The change is intentionally not backwards-compatible at the type level. The old labels are gone from the code, not aliased. If you were reading type === 'concept' in a local fork, rewrite it as type === 'ens'.