Drawloom is built on 10 principles. We use them to make every design decision, from which libraries we use to how the app asks for your approval.

Our 10 principles

  1. Safety. Drawloom is safe and secure by default. It protects your work, your data and your control over what the agent does.
  2. Familiarity. Drawloom should feel like the AI tools you already use. It works with the permissions and review controls you already have.
  3. Vendor agnostic. You shouldn’t be locked in to one AI provider. Codex is supported today, and Drawloom is designed to work with others.
  4. Open standards. We use established formats and protocols before inventing our own, such as MCP for tools and MCP Apps for plugin screens.
  5. Freedom of distribution and use. Everything Drawloom ships uses permissively licensed software, so you’re free to use and share it. We check every dependency, including the ones inside other dependencies.
  6. Local first. You can start on your own computer, without paying for hosted services. We tell you about costs and downloads before you commit.
  7. Don’t over-engineer. Complexity costs time, money and ease of use. If we don’t need it, we leave it out.
  8. Reuse. We use proven tools wherever they fit, such as Temporal for long-running work. Where nothing fits, we learn from the best before building our own.
  9. Resilience and testing. Every part is tested, including what happens when things go wrong. Every replaceable part must pass the same tests.
  10. Clear responsibility. Each part of Drawloom has one job. Parts work together without taking over each other’s work.

Principles in practice

Principles only matter if they change what you build. Two examples:

  • We changed our whole toolchain for a licence. Shortly before release, we found that our JavaScript runtime, Bun, shipped code under a licence that didn’t fit our policy. We moved Drawloom to Node.js rather than make an exception.
  • We didn’t write our own workflow engine. Long-running work needs to survive crashes and restarts. Temporal already does that well, so Drawloom uses it.

Keeping it simple

Before we add anything complex, we ask four questions:

  1. What problem have we actually seen?
  2. Why doesn’t a simpler option work?
  3. What will it cost?
  4. How will we test it?

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