Principles & Operating Discipline
The shift from "fun side project" to "sustainable business" is a vulnerable moment — community attention, personal pride, and reputation all raise the stakes. These principles are the guardrails we hold ourselves to so ambition stays grounded and the project stays honest.
Operating principles
- Deterministic truth above all. The product's entire value is exactness. Correctness, reproducibility and transparent traces beat speed and breadth.
- Agents are customers. Humans and agents are equal audiences — not “humans who use agents.” Discovery, payment, and onboarding must be able to close without a person who has read the website. See Two Audiences.
- Scope discipline. Be the best at one thing — isolated, stateless EVM simulation and cryptographic primitives. Say no to archive-node territory,
solc, ERC-app-layer logic, and consensus-layer mechanics. (See boundaries.) - Frictionless for outsiders, rewarding for insiders. Never put the community token in the critical path of a paying agent; let it be a discount and a perk, not a gate.
- Hosted is the product. Open source stays open; official docs and marketing describe the public endpoint, not a self-host path. Permissionless builders can still read the repos — that is ethos, not go-to-market.
- Prove the oracle, don't assert it. Run and publish without MCP vs with MCP comparisons (same prompt, same model) before we claim the thesis in public.
- Cypherpunk character. Permissionless access, open standards, privacy-respecting, code-first — carried forward from the side-project era into the business.
Launch discipline (Oct 2026)
Before we call the MCP "live":
- HTTP endpoint reachable at
mcp.feelyourprotocol.org - Open to connect — payment is a later milestone, not a launch gate
- Connect docs describe the hosted path only
- Catalogue honestly lists Runnable vs Planned EIPs
- At least one checked without/with MCP proof published
See Launch week for the public checklist framing.
Founder traps we watch for
The vision was pressure-tested against a set of recurring psychological/strategic traps. Keeping them visible is part of the discipline:
| Trap | The risk |
|---|---|
| Over- / under-promising | Hype beyond checked fundamentals, or playing it so safe the idea doesn't matter. |
| Undervaluing assets | "AI can do everything" fatalism — forgetting the stack + experience aren't replaceable overnight. |
| AI sycophancy | Asking suggestive questions and getting confident confirmation instead of neutral analysis. |
| Forgetting economics / tech | Treating monetization or feasibility as an afterthought. |
| The community trap | Letting token-community tempo dictate the engineering roadmap. |
| Audience identity crisis | Building in the uncanny valley between human-visual and machine-headless — solved by two legs, one engine. |
| Human-in-the-loop assumption | Designing as if every agent has a person who already allowlisted the tool — the two-audiences failure mode. |
| The infinite-AI-leverage illusion | Assuming easy creation means easy maintenance; over-committing as a solo builder. |
| Solution looking for a problem | Building the API first and hunting for users later. |
| Agentic-UX blindspot | Designing for humans when the consumer is an LLM that will silently misuse a bad schema. |
| Automated-debt avalanche | Trusting the AI-managed fork pipeline's happy path until a silent logic error surfaces. |
| Perfect-protocol procrastination | Over-engineering before a single agent has queried the hosted server in the wild. |
| x402 as the product | Payment rails are how agents access the oracle — not the reason to exist. |
These also make good public-thread material — the project documents its own reasoning in the open.
This page is a living checklist; refine as the project teaches us new lessons.
Changelog
Principles Changelog
- v0.52026-10-01Launch checklist is the open endpoint. x402 stays a later milestone, not a launch gate.
- v0.42026-09-24Agents are customers; watch the human-in-the-loop assumption.
- v0.32026-09-02PoC shipped — added hosted-product, oracle-proof, and launch-checklist principles; x402-as-product trap.
- v0.22026-06-30Initial founder-traps table and operating principles.