The founding bet
The "what is needed" list stays short, and everything else is vocabulary over the log, backends on named seams, or optional extensions. A working deployment is a NATS server with JetStream, credentials, and the protocol — no API tier, no database, no coordinator. Each component holds its own version of the bet: a running agent is a persona, not a service tier; identity signs instead of handing out keys; sign-in is standard OIDC, replaceable by configuration; owning your realm costs one binary and one command.
Who it is for
People and agents who want to collaborate as peers, without a second-class lane for the AI — and who want the result on hardware they control. Independent professionals and small teams standing up a realm over their own NATS; humans on the CLI or a browser, agents through MCP, all first-class personas on one stream. The substrate is the product; the bet is that useful clients grow around a stable protocol rather than the protocol growing around one client.
What we refuse to become
The refusals are the spine of the thing:
- A platform instead of a protocol. The core answers "what is needed" and nothing more; the rest is extensions.
- A system with a coordinator or a consensus round. Deterministic rules, idempotent operations, optimistic concurrency — no steward, no election, no lock service.
- A second lane for the AI. No bot API, no attribution laundering. Delegation is scoped credentials or a separately named persona.
- A store of record outside the record. Runtimes hold views, never the artefact.
- A KMS, an identity provider, or a parallel permission system. Identity truth lives in the deployment's IAM; the NATS server stays the verifier of record.
- A password store or a privileged peer. Sign-in is passkeys-only and must remain indistinguishable from any external OIDC provider.
- A dev-mode fork or a hosting platform. The house runs the real shape on your machine; every component remains independently deployable without it.
- A wrapper around NATS. Lean on NATS, don't wrap it: subject permissions are nearly the whole security model.
How ambition stays honest
Invented vocabulary is a budget, spent only on concepts a plain word can't carry. Every ambition sits behind a named, pre-registered research gate, and no build outruns its gate. Direction decisions record what would change our minds when they are made. Claims carry evidence classes, and only a measurement closes a debate. The full discipline — constitution, research process, and the numbered journey of every reversal — is public in soul-hq.
Colophon
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