01.05 — The project’s political stance#

The Holy Book doesn’t separate philosophy from the politics of the repo itself. Five operating commitments come out of it.

1. Incorruptibility#

Sharing Ocarina means sharing a car I have maintained entirely myself, for myself, therefore with great care. Still, it is shared as-is, and will remain so. It’s my car.

I channeled all my anger into it, to pour all my love into it.

Ocarina has a direction. Those who wish to take it elsewhere with their wishful thinking are free to fork it and never contact me.

Practical consequences:

• Refuses “stylish” contributions. DHH’s phrase is cited as endorsement: “Fuck You.”
• Owned refusal of unaligned PRs / issues. “No regrets in closing any useless PR or issue.”
• Refuses “democratic governance of code.” The project is explicitly sovereign.

No contribution is excluded a priori. The bar to clear is alignment with the direction.

2. Anti-hype#

That same December 2025, the startup whose name shall go unspoken was featured in certain media outlets as “the AI No-Code test that humiliates Selenium and has BrowserStack shaking.” No less.

None of this, however, will steer Ocarina away from a vision that has been taking shape for over 15 years, far from the arrogance of all these children of the hype.

• No “trendy” dependency without fundamental value. One runtime dependency (python-docx).
• The project claims its lineage from an ancient heritage (ISTQB, ROP, λ-calculus).
• The word “pamphlet” is owned: “any truly ‘cutting-edge’ project, whatever it may be, starts from a pamphlet, is rooted in identity, and goes through a stage of genuine anti-marketing.”

3. Anti-slipologists#

Slipologist = someone who claims to “know everything” without ever practicing, and who pollutes technical discussions with wishful thinking.

For too long, software has been held hostage by a minority, a “1%” who saw fit to turn it into a playground for the initiated: “geek tricks,” “ninja techniques,” “object-oriented.” The verdict is clear: it doesn’t hold up, or barely does.

And:

As does AI, which is quietly rendering the “1%”’s capacity for harm obsolete.

Practical consequences:

• No event-driven programming as a new religion.
• No declarative object-oriented.
• No Rust “for the performance” (see 03-kiss-and-complexity.md).

4. Anti No-Code, Code is Law#

Code is raw data. Auditable. Inspectable. A white box. Exactly what AI has known how to work with since its very beginnings.

And:

The fact remains that code is the most sovereign asset we have, and a value proposition centered on taking it away from us makes us hold our nose.

Practical consequences:

• All Ocarina user code is Python. Auditable, copyable, runnable without any third-party platform.
• The framework is explicitly portable without installation: “In the most extreme cases: Ocarina doesn’t need to be installed. Copy it, adapt it, run it.”
• No SaaS attached. No proprietary cloud runner.

5. Permanent refusal of async/await#

The only constraint: Ocarina will never support async/await.

Material justifications:

6. Secession#

Today, people launch projects the way you’d pop out to buy a pack of cigarettes. (…) They think they’re smart, but: the reality is that every VC and every LP is well aware of it, and each plays their part in a fool’s game.

Consequence: Ocarina ships under Igor Casanova’s author name. No commercial entity behind it. No support promise. No public roadmap. The repo is offered “as is” in the MIT sense.

As for me, I have nothing to lose in terms of reputation, there is no reputation to build under this name. Only a message to deliver, as it is, unfiltered.

7. Refusal of “tricks/hacks” (on the AI project)#

ocarina-with-ai-example’s CLAUDE.md spells out the discipline:

No tricks or hacks. JS-clicks to skip hit-testing, # noqa to silence a rule, time.sleep to mask a race, driver.implicitly_wait to patch a timing bug. If a hack is genuinely the only option, document why no clean fix exists and mark it so a reader doesn’t copy the pattern.

That’s the operational discipline of the principles above, in a real suite.

Counter-example cited:

The JS-click-for-logout incident is the canonical anti-example: ElementClickInterceptedException had a clean polling fix; the JS click hid the problem.

Summary table#

Closing word#

Ocarina is not and will never be a pontificating solution. Ocarina is and WILL REMAIN a solution for solving real-world issues.

That political stance has direct practical fallout on what’s worth reading in depth: the source, not a changelog. The Holy Book, not a marketing blog post. That’s the auditability promise of ../11-independence/02-auditability.md