A manifesto for verifying software in the agentic era.
Software engineering's trust stack was built around white-box executable specifications. That stack worked at human-scale code volume. Agentic development changes the rate and density of what the stack must absorb, and the implementer-verifier identity that made the old stack work has split. The trust stack must rebuild around a new locus.
This manifesto names that locus: boundaries.
This is an ecosystem manifesto. It declares a set of principles for verifying software in an era when implementer and verifier are no longer the same agent. It is not a methodology, not a framework, and not a product specification. Frameworks and methodologies can attach to it; it does not depend on any of them.
The manifesto is hosted under the suites-dev organization because Suites is one implementation of these principles. The manifesto is not owned by Suites, and is licensed for free use, adaptation, and translation by anyone.
- Read it. Five minutes. MANIFESTO.md.
- Cite it. In your engineering handbook, your architectural decision records, your team onboarding. Attribution under CC BY 4.0.
- Translate it. Hebrew, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin. Open a PR with a
MANIFESTO.<lang>.mdfile. CC BY 4.0 explicitly permits this. - Sign it. If you agree with the principles and want your name listed. See CONTRIBUTING.md.
- Disagree with it. Open an issue, fork it, or write a response. The manifesto's value comes from being contestable.
| File | Purpose |
|---|---|
| MANIFESTO.md | The canonical document: preamble with value pairs, principles, anti-misinterpretations |
| LINEAGE.md | The thinkers and works whose ideas this manifesto extends |
| SIGNATORIES.md | People who have signed |
| CONTRIBUTING.md | How to sign, translate, or propose changes |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
You are free to share, adapt, translate, and build upon this manifesto for any purpose, including commercial use, provided you give appropriate credit.