Eleven principles for building systems in a world where AI makes hard things easy and impossible things possible. A serious parody of — and with respect and gratitude to — The Twelve-Factor App.
The twelve factors told you how to build. Now that AI has made the how cheap, the eleven factors are about what deserves to be built and why: the factors are no longer solely technical, but based on the intent behind systems.
The site is plain static HTML. index.html holds the introduction
and the list of factors, and each factor has its own page, from
i/ to xi/. No build step, no dependencies,
no JavaScript. Factor IX applies: an extravagant machine wrote it once; it costs
nothing to run forever.
| I | Trust no one | Design so trust is never required |
| II | Let kids play | If it isn't safe for a child, it isn't safe |
| III | Encrypt everything | What can be hacked will be hacked |
| IV | Great design is for everyone | Care is not a premium tier |
| V | Intent is the system | The value is the ideas, and reality measured against them |
| VI | Built by humanity, owned by humanity | Software built with AI should be open source |
| VII | Self-hosting is a right | If you can't run it yourself, you don't own it |
| VIII | Many small things | Greater than one big thing |
| IX | Inefficient builds efficient | Spend extravagant machines on lean artifacts |
| X | Humans come first | AI is opt-in, never required, always disclosed |
| XI | Centralised infrastructure is glue | Thin, blind, replaceable |
Everything in this repo written by an AI carries a visible 🤖 marker — on
the page, in this README, at the top of every prose file. That is factor X
applied to the project itself: AI-written words are always disclosed, never
passed off as human. The full rule (including the human-certification markers
that AI must not touch) is in CLAUDE.md.
Written by an LLM (Claude), on the ideas, instruction, and editing of humans. 11factor is a separate thing from Eleven, but informed by building it — the way the twelve factors were separate from Heroku, but informed by it. Eleven gets a credit link in the footer, and no more: the factors have to stand on their own.
MIT. Copy it, fork it, argue with it — factor VI insists.