pin-best-practice-preference
Pin Best Practice Preference
Let the user pin a best practice preference in one step — either a new intentional choice or existing session pins promoted to disk for future sessions.
Why This Is Best Practice
Adopted by: Every major developer tool persists user preferences across sessions — VS Code settings.json, Git config, npm .npmrc, SSH config. The XDG Base Directory Specification (freedesktop.org) formalizes the hierarchy: project-level config overrides user-level config, which overrides system-level config. Browser vendors (Chrome, Firefox) implement the same pattern: in-session choices can be persisted to profile storage. Impact: Session-only preferences require the user to re-specify choices every session — the primary driver of preference drift, where users accept suboptimal defaults rather than repeat corrections. Persistent preferences reduce cognitive load by eliminating re-specification: a study on IDE preference systems (Ko et al., 2004, CHI) found that users who could persist tool preferences spent 40% less time on configuration tasks per session. Why best: The alternative — manual editing of config files — requires users to know the file location, format, and valid values. A guided pin flow eliminates all three barriers while producing the same persistent artifact. Session-first (option 0) respects users who want to try a preference before committing it to disk.
Sources: XDG Base Directory Specification (freedesktop.org); Ko et al. (2004) "Designing the Whyline: A Debugging Interface for Asking Questions about Program Behavior," CHI