Make a miniature model first

I've been taught this time and time again, I've seen Cormac do it repeatedly in the ECMAScript design process, I've been told by Mitch repeatedly to do it, but it still hasn't become instinct for me: when you're facing a dauntingly large system, it's incredibly helpful to start by extracting coherent but manageably small subsets of the design and model them first. It's amazing how well that works to make a system less terrifying to work with.