Values & Manifesto

Locked positions. Override taste, deadline, and dopamine.

MANIFESTO · POSITION

Small over large

Small static sites. Small atomic packages. Small commits. Small decisions, well-cited.

Public over private

Public knowledge. Public code. Public journal. The default is share; the exception is private.

Durable over disposable

Plain markdown. Git primary. Six mirrors. If every commercial host dies tomorrow, the archive still renders locally from a clone.

Free over paid

No card on file. No subscriptions. No Pro tier. Donations only. This is a values-lock, not a preference.

Agents over apps

Composable agent skills beat single-vendor apps. MCP is the lingua franca. The fleet is the unit.

VALUES · COMPASS

Free tier or nothing

No card on file. Has killed adoption of Cloudflare R2, Vercel Pro, Auth0, Clerk Pro, Firebase Blaze, Twilio. Non-negotiable.

Donations only

No Pro tier on anything I ship. No ads. No recurring fees. Buy Me a Coffee + GitHub Sponsors + UPI.

Deletion over archival

Superseded knowledge is hard-deleted. Git log is the audit trail. Status flags rot faster than files.

Parallel by default

Independent work fans out. Sequential is a bug.

Read before edit

No memory-only claims about a project’s behaviour. Cite file:line or don’t cite.

DECISION PRINCIPLES

Deep modules over shallow

Narrow interface, thick implementation (Ousterhout Ch. 4). Every new file justifies its own signature count.

Delete instead of flag

Superseded knowledge is git-rm’d. History is the audit trail. Status flags rot.

Search twice before deciding

No memory-only answers about pricing, tool availability, library status. Two independent searches minimum.

One decision, one commit

When a decision lands in chat, write the file and commit in the same turn.