# The Arbor Philosophy

Arbor is an open-source movement built entirely around three core, unwavering principles. Every architectural decision, every pull request, and every line of code must be measured strictly against this hierarchy:

## 1. Consumer First 🥇
**The developer experience and value proposition to the end-user must always triumph above every other metric.**
Our tools should feel deeply intuitive, extremely fast, and powerfully useful out of the box. No endless configurations, no broken integrations—just a beautiful GUI and blazing-fast CLI that immediately works. Visual design matters. Tooling friction is unacceptable.

## 2. Accessibility Second 🥈
**Intelligence must not be gatekept.**
Graph analysis and AI-driven architecture tools should not be isolated to proprietary environments. Arbor is designed so that complex blast radius analysis and semantic code intelligence are openly accessible. It must work on any machine, parse seamlessly across all major codebases (from Rust to Kotlin to Dart), and invite an inclusive developer community without elitist barriers to entry.

## 3. Affordability Next 🥉
**Zero-friction adoption on constrained resources.**
We optimize aggressively for minimal computational overhead. Whether you are scaling an enterprise monolith on massive compute servers, or deploying a localized agentic toolchain on an old laptop, Arbor must remain computationally and financially affordable to run. Native Tree-sitter binaries, zero-exfiltration local computing, and hyper-efficient graphs guarantee peak performance on consumer-grade hardware.

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*If you are contributing to Arbor, thank you. Please ensure your code aligns with this compass.*
