Gene Key 17 sits on the same numbering that Human Design and, before it, the I Ching use. It shares its number with Human Design Gate 17 ("Following Opinions"), carried over intact from that system rather than derived independently, and beneath both lies I Ching hexagram 17, Following. Rudd retained from Human Design the sixty-four positions, their King Wen hexagram numbers, the arrangement of the hexagrams around a zodiacal wheel, and the pairing of each key with a "programming partner" opposite it on that wheel; he set aside the bodygraph, the types and the strategies, and added the Shadow-Gift-Siddhi spectrum. Three datable layers therefore stack here and are best kept distinct: an ancient hexagram, a 1987 Human Design gate, and a 2009 Gene Keys reading.
Richard Rudd's own reading of Gene Key 17 moves from the shadow of Opinion, a fixed view mistaken for insight, through the gift of Far Sightedness, an opinion held loosely enough to track a genuine pattern over time, to the siddhi of Omniscience. Rudd ties the arc to the key's I Ching correspondent, Hexagram 17, Following, whose received image of movement content to follow a willing sequence he reads as opinion that follows the evidence rather than leading it.