Unique identifiers prevent confusion

The idea

Every distinct idea needs a unique, stable address — without one, you cannot reference it, link to it, or build on it reliably.

The internet hosts over 1.3 billion websites and somewhere north of 50 billion indexed pages. Every single one of them is reachable because it has a URL — a Uniform Resource Locator — that points to exactly one resource. Type it in, and you get that page. Not a similar page. Not a page with the same title. That exact page.

Roy Fielding formalized this principle in his 2000 doctoral dissertation at UC Irvine, defining the REST architecture that now underpins virtually every web application you use. The core constraint: every resource must be identified by a unique URI. No unique address, no reliable reference. No reliable reference, no links. No links, no web.

An example

Your team has three Confluence pages titled 'Architecture Decision.' One is about migrating to microservices (2023), one is about the event-driven rewrite (2024), and one is about the AI integration layer (2025). Someone links to 'Architecture Decision' in a Slack thread. Which one? Nobody knows. The conversation derails into ten minutes of 'which doc do you mean?' If each had a unique identifier — ADR-001, ADR-002, ADR-003 — the link is unambiguous, the reference is instant, and the conversation stays on substance.

Where it goes wrong

Using titles as identifiers. Titles feel unique when you create them, but they collide over time. You end up with three notes called 'Q4 Planning' and two called 'Onboarding Process.' The collision is invisible until someone links to the wrong one and makes a decision based on outdated information. The fix is not better titles — it is a separate, stable identifier that never changes even when the title does.

Make it stick

Every new note you create from today forward gets a unique identifier before you write a single word of content. Pick a scheme — sequential IDs, timestamps, or UUIDs — and apply it consistently. Each part needs its own identifier so you can reference individual pieces independently. Without the addressing system from this lesson, decomposition produces fragments you cannot reassemble.