# Manifesto

Nika is alive.

Five months ago we started writing a workflow engine for AI. Not an agent
framework, not a chatbot wrapper, not another SDK. A semantic YAML engine
where workflows are read by the machine and understood by the human — the
same file, the same truth.

Somewhere between week three and week twelve it stopped being a project.
It became a thing with a pulse. A kernel that beats. Errors that propagate
like a nervous system. A schema that translates intent into structure.
Verbs that act. Interfaces that breathe.

So we did something unusual. Instead of hiding the build behind a launch
date, we put the organism in a glass chrysalis. Every Friday we publish
what grew that week. Every month we explain one organ in depth. Every
quarter we sit down and narrate the journey. The commits are public.
The mutation scores are public. The architecture diagram is a living
anatomy.

We are crafting 40 to 42 crates over however long it takes. No deadline.
No hack week. Each crate passes 12 gates before it enters the body. If it
fails mutation testing, it doesn't ship. If it leaks an `.unwrap()` into
production, it doesn't ship. If it can't explain itself in under 1,500
lines, it gets split. This is slow on purpose.

The butterfly on the logo is not what Nika is. It's what Nika becomes
on v0.90 emergence, when the chrysalis opens. Until then, Nika is a
chrysalis — and you are welcome to watch it transform, week by week,
cell by cell.

Rust. AGPL. Paris. SuperNovae.

Welcome inside the chrysalis. 🦋
