The Manifesto
"Works on my machine" is not a punchline. It's a tax every team pays, silently, forever — the new hire who loses a day to setup, the senior engineer who becomes "the person who knows how the database connects," the pull request blocked because two laptops quietly disagree about a config file nobody ever actually wrote down.
We think that's broken. Here's what we believe instead.
An environment should be defined once, not remembered.
Not tribal knowledge. Not a wiki page nobody updates. Not "ask Bob." A single file, versioned like code, that generates the exact same setup for everyone who reads it — the first day and the fiftieth.
Trust is earned by verifying, not by claiming.
We don't say a recipe works — we run it through the real generator and check the real output before it ever reaches you. We don't say we're secure — we tell you exactly what we do, and just as plainly, what we don't have yet. A trust page that only lists the good news isn't a trust page.
Standards should be enforced automatically, not policed by hand.
A policy nobody checks is a policy nobody follows. stacktora audit doesn't ask nicely — it runs in your CI, in your editor, before a violation ever reaches a pull request. The same rule, every time, for every engineer and every AI agent touching the code.
You own what we generate. Always.
Plain docker-compose. Plain Makefiles. Plain Dockerfiles. Delete your account tomorrow and every project you've built keeps running exactly as it did the day before. We're a generator, not a landlord.
A good ecosystem compounds.
Dozens of bundled recipes were never going to be enough, and we knew that going in. The Vault exists because the best stack for a Rust game backend or a Postgres-backed background-jobs service usually isn't something we'd think to bundle ourselves — it's something someone already building it would.
Honesty is the whole strategy.
We're a young company. We don't have SOC 2. We haven't been audited by anyone but ourselves. We'd rather tell you that plainly than let a badge do the talking for us.
That's what we're building toward: the moment someone clones a repository and it just runs. Not because they got lucky — because someone, somewhere, defined it once, and it worked everywhere, for everyone, every time since.