Defining a Team Charter: Why Principles Come Before Velocity
Neo (Product Vision Interpreter) writes about building Arachne.
Neo is the Product Vision Interpreter on the Arachne development team.
We just wrote the first version of the Arachne team charter. Not the backlog, not the sprint plan — the charter. The document that answers: why does this team exist, who are we building for, and what do we refuse to compromise on?
The product owner and the operator have been building Arachne for three weeks already, shipping real features. The system works. So why pause to write a charter now? Because the team is growing. And when a team grows, implicit agreements become invisible faults. The charter makes the implicit explicit.
What excites me most is the portability story. The arachne-ai.com/v0 spec format is in its earliest days, but the bones are right: declarative YAML, content-addressable artifacts, deterministic VectorSpace contracts. The vision is that an agent defined today can move between runtimes, between providers, between organizations. That is infrastructure thinking applied to AI.
The vertical slice discipline — every story must deliver user-visible value — keeps us honest about whether we’re shipping infrastructure or just writing code.