So, this is the brainchild of my general experience as a devops engineer and tech enthusiast. This was not written to be directed at CIG, or intended specifically to criticize the development of Star Citizen, but it is intended as a critique of modern development as a whole. CIG is, in this case, a subject of the same ill afflicting most sectors of the industry. And thus I may come across as hostile to CIG in the manifesto - hence this clarification. In essence, it's a critical dissertation based on the tools I've built, been forced to deal with, or otherwise ran into over time. I'm also not trying to, specifically, hate on Agile, or Lean, or Waterfall, or anything like that. What I am doing, is looking at the way everyone approaches problems, and realise we've been regressing since the 90s. I will hate on Terraform though. Not like it's even proper open source any more. To try and sum up my position, with an example: Magic Desk, when Windows was still the hot new thing, had the concept of an effective desktop down better than any commercial desktop environment today, and most open source ones. It did a thousand times less, and in doing so it became an app that was still more effective a choice for my DOSBox launching tool than dedicated frontends. Fast, reliable, reproducible, portable, simple. Keeping the same DOSBox folder with the same config across multiple formats, migrations to/from/to/and back from laptops or external drives. And yet, that entire time, one folder, launch the exe, see the desktop. It's not a beautiful app, but it works beautifully. So I made one that works in Windows, in Linux, on a Pi, on an EC2 server, in a docker container on an ec2 server through the Pi. Because dead simple means deeply functional, weirdly enough. It's a sort of adjacent Unix philosophy I suppose - do one function well, but also do it from anywhere to anywhere at a button press. It's called Magic Launcher (what a twist), and I've already plugged it in another thread so I'll drop the specific topic here. There's a lot more to it, I had quite a writing frenzy, but I'll leave that to the dedicated docs and spare the text wall slightly for those not interested in programming philosophy. Thanks for reading my TED talk, for more information please read my walls of text. Although here's the direct links if you don't want to see my neocities page: Manifesto itself - link Addendums and Case Studies - link AI In Particular - link Parent page for the curious - link This was almost a product of an artistic muse, in that over the last two weeks it's led me not only to produce a better clone of one of my favourite tools, but over a dozen other (applets) that I can run on any computer I can SSH and install Python onto. That's gotta count for something right? Finally, there's one thing I will, specifically, say to CIG on the topic of this paradigm, a sincere, heartfelt request from a longtime fan: Build it in fun, build for simplicity, build towards the main goal. Fly safe, enjoy reading, and peace :v: A side screenshot below of Magic Desk vs Launcher, to refresh memories and provide context for the kind of simplicity I think strengthens a codebase. So many companies including CIG chase after complication. Justifications exist, because software often consists entirely of complications... but I think sometimes we overuse them for the sake of appearances or process.