architecture/manifesto.md

Manifesto

Who We Are

We are a small, focused team building tools that make work easier. We believe software should support business processes without requiring everyone to become a developer. We build in public - sharing our AI-augmented development practices, tools, and learnings with the developer community.

Who We Serve

Domain Experts

Business analysts, operations managers, process owners - people who understand their domain deeply but shouldn't need to code. They want to create and evolve software solutions that support their processes directly, without waiting for IT or hiring developers.

Agencies & Consultancies

Teams building solutions for clients using our platform. They need speed, consistency, and the ability to deliver maintainable solutions across engagements. Every efficiency gain multiplies across projects.

Organizations

From small businesses to enterprises - any organization that needs maintainable software to support their business processes. They benefit from solutions built on our platform, whether created by their own domain experts or by agencies on their behalf.

What They're Trying to Achieve

• "Help me create software that supports my business process without learning to code"
• "Help me evolve my solutions as my business changes"
• "Help me deliver maintainable solutions to clients faster"
• "Help me get software that actually fits how we work"
• "Help me reduce dependency on developers for business process changes"

What We Believe

Empowering Domain Experts

We believe the people closest to business problems should be able to solve them:

• Domain expertise matters most. The person who understands the process deeply is better positioned to design the solution than a developer translating requirements.

• Low-code removes barriers. When domain experts can create and evolve solutions directly, organizations move faster and get better-fitting software.

• Maintainability enables evolution. Business processes change. Software that supports them must be easy to adapt without starting over.

• Technology should disappear. The best tools get out of the way. Domain experts should think about their processes, not about technology.

AI-Augmented Development

We believe AI fundamentally changes how software is built:

• Developers become orchestrators. The role shifts from writing every line to directing, reviewing, and refining. The human provides judgment, context, and intent. AI handles execution and recall.

• Repetitive tasks should be automated. If you do something more than twice, encode it. Commits, PR creation, issue management, code review - these should flow, not interrupt.

• AI amplifies individuals. A solo developer with good AI tooling can accomplish what used to require a team. Small teams can tackle problems that used to need departments.

• Knowledge belongs in systems, not heads. Best practices, patterns, and learnings should be encoded where AI can apply them. Tribal knowledge is a liability.

• Iteration speed is a competitive advantage. The faster you can go from idea to deployed code to learning, the faster you improve. AI collapses the feedback loop.

Quality Without Ceremony

• Ship small, ship often
• Automate verification, not just generation
• Good defaults beat extensive configuration
• Working software over comprehensive documentation

Sustainable Pace

• Tools should reduce cognitive load, not add to it
• Automation should free humans for judgment calls
• The goal is flow, not burnout

Guiding Principles

1. Encode, don't document. If something is important enough to write down, it's important enough to encode into a skill, command, or agent that can act on it.

2. Small teams, big leverage. Design for amplification. Every tool, pattern, and practice should multiply what individuals can accomplish.

3. Opinionated defaults, escape hatches available. Make the right thing easy. Make customization possible but not required.

4. Learn in public. Capture learnings. Update the system. Share what works.

5. Ship to learn. Prefer shipping something imperfect and learning from reality over planning for perfection.

Non-Goals

• Replacing human judgment. AI and low-code tools augment human decision-making; they don't replace it. Domain expertise, critical thinking, and understanding of business context remain human responsibilities.

• Supporting every tool and platform. We go deep on our chosen stack rather than shallow on everything.

• Building generic software. We focus on maintainable solutions for business processes, not general-purpose applications.

• Comprehensive documentation for its own sake. We encode knowledge into actionable systems. Docs exist to explain the "why," not to duplicate what the system already does.