Where this comes from

This is a spec, not a product. It came together from two essays written toward the same idea from different directions.

Jake Gaylor’s Agent-Ready Infrastructure named the properties that make a system safe to hand to a competent stranger. His stranger and this list are the same test. Build the system so a stranger can operate it on day one, and you have built the system an agent can operate on every day after.

Alex Artigues’ Honor the lower layer argued the other half: what it takes for the thing a newcomer changes to be the real thing that ships. Build in the platform’s own terms, and keep its spec readable and predictable before it runs, so what a newcomer reads is what runs. That is factor I, and the others need it to hold.

The format is borrowed, gratefully, from 12factor.net.