Vision

SF is an autonomous single-repo software operator. Forge is the product; UOK is the internal execution kernel. It handles planning, execution, verification, and shipping so you can focus on what to build, not how to wrangle the tools.

Who it's for

Anyone who codes with AI agents — solo developers shipping faster, open-source maintainers handling scale, vibe coders who think in outcomes. SF adapts to skill level and workflow.

Principles

Extension-first. If it can be an extension, it should be. Core stays lean. New capabilities belong in extensions, skills, and plugins unless they fundamentally require core integration.

Simplicity over abstraction. The codebase was aggressively cleaned up. Every line earns its place. Don't add helpers, utilities, or abstractions unless they eliminate real duplication or solve a real problem. Three similar lines of code is better than a premature abstraction.

Tests are the contract. If you change behavior, the tests tell you what you broke. Write tests for new behavior. Trust the test suite.

Purpose-driven TDD. The eight PDD fields — purpose, consumer, contract, failure boundary, evidence, non-goals, invariants, and assumptions — are the core gate. Non-trivial work should not move to implementation before purpose is explicit and a falsifier exists.

Ship fast, fix fast. Get it out, iterate quickly, don't let perfect be the enemy of good. Every release should work, but we'd rather ship and patch than delay and accumulate.

Provider-agnostic. SF works with any LLM provider. No architectural decisions should privilege one provider over another.

Sharpen by comparison, not imitation. Learn from Claude Code, Codex, Aider, gsd-2, and Plandex where they are strong, but do not collapse Forge into a generic coder CLI. Forge's differentiator is autonomous single-repo execution on top of UOK. When an external pattern proves itself, absorb it into SF/UOK as first-party behavior instead of leaving it as a permanent comparison layer.

Direction

Forge grows as the single-repo product.
UOK leads the runtime model and execution semantics.
ACE Coder grows the multi-repo and large-scale orchestration path.
External CLIs are comparison inputs used to sharpen workflow and execution choices.

What we won't accept

These save everyone time. Don't open PRs for:

Enterprise patterns. Dependency injection containers, abstract factories, strategy-pattern-for-the-sake-of-it, over-engineered config systems. This is a CLI tool, not a Spring application.
Framework swaps. Rewriting working code in a different library or framework without a clear, measurable improvement in performance or maintainability. "I prefer X" is not sufficient motivation.
Cosmetic refactors. Renaming variables to your preferred style, reordering imports, reformatting code that works. This is pure churn that creates merge conflicts and review burden for zero user value.
Complexity without user value. If a change adds abstraction, indirection, or configuration but doesn't improve something a user can see or feel, it doesn't belong here.
Heavy orchestration layers. Don't duplicate what the agent infrastructure already provides. Build on top of it, don't wrap it.

Relationship to SF-1

SF is the future. SF-1 continues to serve its community but SF is where active development, new features, and architectural investment happen. The goal is to eventually migrate SF-1 users to SF.

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