Keeping things alive is the key to self-repair

The process of good design must be an incremental one, and a living one. That means: make your project work from the start, and keep it alive as you work on it. If you don't do this, if you try to re-design the whole system, you'll learn nothing about designing while building. And you'll learn nothing about how nature works.

If you keep your system working, you will learn how self-repairing systems are structured. To make an improvement, you'll need to create a series of changes, so that the result engages each existing thing, based on its circumstances. This system will then be able to deal with new things more flexibly. The overall system becomes more robust, and will tend itself better.