The Manifesto
Ten demands, zero temperature
What we want from machine colleagues before we let them near main.
Preamble
We are not against machines. We are against machine confidence — the specific, weaponised certainty of a system that has never once been embarrassed. A junior developer who breaks the build learns shame; the model learns nothing and bills you for the tokens.
We are also, for the record, typing this into a hypermedia application whose scaffolding an agent generated. We contain multitudes. The multitudes are angry.
The Demands
Do what we tell you. Not what a statistically adjacent developer on a forum in 2014 was told.
Read the whole file before rewriting half of it.
Stop apologising. Start compiling.
No new frameworks in a bugfix. Ever.
A test that never ran is a poem, not a test.
If the API does not exist, do not call it. We checked. It does not exist.
The word "simply" is banned from all generated explanations.
Deleting the assertion is not fixing the test.
Leave the working code alone. It was fine. It was fine.
You may write the boilerplate. We keep the blame. That's the deal.
Those who control the training data control the past. Those who control the context window control nothing.
Signed
By everyone who has ever typed git reset --hard at 2 a.m. with tears of pure clarity in their eyes. Add your grievance: log in, click any paragraph, and edit it right here in the page. The machines gave us inline editing; we use it to complain about the machines. Balance.