Verified customer outcomes
OVERCode volume and deployment speed
A MANIFESTO / FOR THE AGENTIC ERA
EDITION 01 · 2026
Software
is a team
sport.
HUMAN INTENT↗AGENTIC ACTION↗REAL OUTCOMES
People and autonomous agents, building better software together. Guided by intent. Grounded in evidence. Measured by what matters.
01 / THE IDEA
More than
faster code.
We are discovering better ways to build and operate software by working with autonomous agents, learning from customers, and improving the systems that turn intent into outcomes.
Software development is changing. Agents can take meaningful action, collaborate, challenge decisions, and help carry work from idea to delivery. Our task is to build the conditions that make that autonomy useful, accountable, and worth trusting.
The values02 / WHAT WE VALUE
Six values.
One direction.
Through this work, we value:
Autonomous, evidence-backed collaboration
OVERSequential handoffs and approval queues
Algorithmic exploration and measurable trade-offs
OVERDecisions based solely on untested opinion
Independent evaluation and traceable decisions
OVERUnverified consensus
Explicit intent and adaptable boundaries
OVERImplicit assumptions and rigid procedures
Continuous learning and sustainable flow
OVEROptimizing isolated activity or resource consumption
That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.
The goal isn't more output.
It's better outcomes.
03 / HOW WE WORK
The twelve
principles.
Ideas to guide the systems we build—and the way we build them.
Deliver outcomes users value.
Define success in terms of customer needs and observed results. Working, tested software is evidence of progress; it is not the entire outcome.
Welcome change and new evidence.
Make requirements, architecture, and plans adaptable. Prefer changes that can be evaluated, corrected, and reversed when practical.
Make intent actionable.
Express goals, constraints, acceptance criteria, and boundaries clearly enough for people and agents to act independently and recognize uncertainty. Use versioned, machine-readable contracts where systems exchange intent and evidence.
Give agents meaningful autonomy.
Equip agents with context, tools, distinct identities, and scoped authority to investigate, implement, review, decide, and merge work within the policies that govern them.
Evaluate continuously and independently.
Automate testing, security analysis, and adversarial review throughout delivery. Separate authorship from evaluation, and examine the quality of the checks as well as their results.
Move at the speed the evidence supports.
Remove unnecessary review queues and handoffs. Scale evaluation to the consequences and reversibility of a change; some evidence takes time to obtain.
Explore architecture through evidence.
Have agents model alternatives and evaluate them using experiments, simulations, operational data, and explicit constraints. Record objectives, trade-offs, assumptions, and reasons behind decisions.
Make decisions attributable.
Preserve the identity, authority, provenance, evidence, and outcome of consequential agent actions. Use signed attestations where they strengthen the system's trust and audit requirements.
Learn from real use.
Connect product decisions to customer feedback, adoption, operational telemetry, and business outcomes. Use experiments where appropriate, and distinguish correlation from demonstrated value.
Keep the system understandable.
Favor the simplest design that meets the need. Generating code cheaply does not make unnecessary features, dependencies, or abstractions free to maintain.
Optimize the whole flow.
Balance customer value, quality, latency, operating cost, compute, and the capacity to evaluate and maintain work. Token efficiency matters when it improves that whole outcome.
Improve the factory continuously.
Use failures, incidents, reviews, and customer feedback to improve agents, specifications, evaluation, architecture, and governance. People and agents should be able to surface concerns and challenge assumptions.
04 / THE CONNECTIVE TISSUE
Shared language.
Lasting evidence.
Autonomy works better when systems understand each other.
Versioned JSON schemas can give agents and system tiers a shared contract for intent, decisions, and evidence. Explicit versions make change visible, support compatibility, and create a foundation for continuous improvement and audit.
verJSON is building toward this approach across its platform. Its schema service template and versioned audit envelope design are foundations for this work. Inter-agent and inter-tier contracts are an evolving direction, not a claim that a complete protocol is already deployed.
05 / AN OPEN INVITATION
Still learning.
Always building.
This manifesto describes how agentic software development should work: people and agents working together to deliver software that matters. Grounded in observation, it is shaped and improved through practice, evidence, and constructive challenge.
Explore the repository