Computation belongs close to its context
Systems should remain useful without a required network, account, or provider. Local-first is an operational boundary: data and execution can stay under the operator's control.
Manifesto / Revision 0.1 / 23 August 2026
We cultivate systems that can account for themselves.
Software becomes infrastructure when people can inspect its boundaries, reproduce its evidence, and continue its stewardship. These commitments define the work before they define the institution.
Eight commitments
Memory is part of the machine
Past execution is not residue. Used carefully, it can improve placement, recovery, retrieval, and understanding. Memory must remain inspectable, bounded, and separable from model semantics.
Evidence travels with the claim
Benchmarks name their hardware, workload, commit, protocol, and limits. Releases bind artifacts to source. Proofs state exactly what they verify, and never pretend to establish the truth of their inputs.
Refusal is a valid result
When an input is ambiguous, a budget is exhausted, or evidence is insufficient, the system should refuse rather than guess. We publish deliberate non-capabilities alongside features.
Negative results stay visible
A failed optimization prevents repeated work. A retracted claim remains in the record. We value the experiment that closes a path as much as the one that opens it.
Performance never outranks correctness
Speedups must preserve the stated numerical and durability invariants. Moving work into an unreported phase is not an improvement. A measured regression is more useful than a convenient story.
Open means governable
A public repository is necessary but insufficient. Roles, decisions, rights, security processes, and succession must be legible enough for contributors to rely on them.
Stewardship should outlive origin
Projects begin with authors, but durable commons need institutions. Hyphae Research Foundation is being formed so responsibility, infrastructure, and knowledge can survive any one company or person.
What follows
The record is part of the product.
We will maintain research ledgers, decision records, immutable release receipts, known-limit registers, and transfer records. They are not paperwork around the work. They are how another person can determine what the work is.
A commons is credible when someone outside its founding circle can verify the state of the project and earn authority within it.
This manifesto is versioned. Changes should be proposed in public, include the reason for the revision, and preserve earlier versions. It is editorial guidance, not a warranty or a substitute for a project's normative contracts.