manifesto

Principles

Living document, revised in public. rev 0001

1. Judgement is the job.

   We let agents do the typing and spend our own time on what they can't: deciding what is worth building, and telling a real solution from a plausible one.

2. Fail loud.

   We wire systems to halt and page the moment correctness is in doubt, rather than recover silently and meet the damage at reconciliation.

3. No comprehension debt.

   We don't merge what we can't explain; a system whose theory lives only in an agent's output is one nobody can change safely.

4. You build it, you run it.

   Whoever ships a system carries its pager, runs its post-mortem, and fixes its runbook; we don't pass code over a wall to someone who didn't write it.

5. Keep your agency.

   We use agents to extend our thinking, not replace it; the person stays in the driver's seat and owns the call, even when the agent wrote the option.

6. Slope over snapshot.

   We weigh rate of change over a fixed snapshot of skills, because the tools redraw the baseline every few months; what an engineer can learn next matters more than what they know today.

7. Harder problems, not bigger teams.

   You climb by taking on harder problems and owning more of the outcome. Growth here is impact, not how many people report to you.

Principles are easy to publish; hiring is where we prove we mean them.