eleven / messenger Public

docs: the second rule — everything here is built to outlive AI (#735)

Codifies the principle: code stays human-manageable, tools stay
human-understandable, and nothing assumes AI stays available or cheap.
If AI vanishes, humans carry the product; if it gets cheaper, this is
the baseline it builds from.

Co-authored-by: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

Paul Campbell 3 months ago 6397b9a73ff1bebc70cbf6ea3eb255566dccf62a parent bc74990

1 file changed, +24 −0

CLAUDE.md +24 −0

diff --git a/CLAUDE.md b/CLAUDE.md

index ca8c231..da02578 100644

--- a/CLAUDE.md

+++ b/CLAUDE.md

@@ -76,6 +76,30 @@ the signer + aps envelope lives in `internal/apns/` (shared by the messenger and

the relay so they can't drift). Web Push is unaffected (per-instance VAPID, no

shared secret). See `docs/push-relay.md`.

+## 🤖 The second rule: built to outlive AI

+Everything built here is designed to **outlive AI**. This codebase was largely

+produced with AI assistance, and it must never *depend* on that assistance:

+- **All code stays human-manageable.** If AI became unavailable or

+ unaffordable tomorrow, a small human team could read, maintain, extend, and

+ ship this product. That's a load-bearing reason for standing choices:

+ vanilla JS with no build step, one boring Go binary, additive migrations,

+ pure helpers split out for testing, comments that explain *why*.

+- **All tools stay human-understandable.** Scripts, deploy paths, and dev

+ harnesses must be readable in one sitting and operable by hand. Never add

+ machinery that only an LLM can drive, and never encode critical operational

+ knowledge solely in prompts or agent memory — it belongs in the repo's docs.

+- **Nothing assumes AI stays cheap.** Features, operations, and the product's

+ economics must outlast today's low relative cost of AI-assisted production.

+ When a design choice trades human legibility for AI-assisted convenience,

+ legibility wins.

+The upside cuts the other way too: if high-capability AI keeps getting

+cheaper, a human-legible, well-tested baseline is the most solid floor it can

+build from. Either way the product doesn't wobble with the AI industry's

+fortunes.

## Architecture

Single static Go binary; the frontend and a pure-Go SQLite engine are compiled