Foundry mission and top goals

Status: canonical product mission for Foundry Core

Mission

Make Foundry the best and most flexible way to quickly build unique websites for every customer — sites that evolve as needs grow, and that the customer owns outright instead of being locked into a platform.

This mission is the stable decision filter for Core plans, documentation, contracts, and implementation. Plans may explain how Foundry advances the mission, but they must not redefine it. When the mission changes, update this file first and reconcile every entry point through the documentation consistency gate.

Top Goals

1. Fast professional delivery. Move from a customer brief to a credible, branded, reviewable site through a discoverable and repeatable path.
2. Genuine creative range. Produce materially different structures and art directions, not merely palette or font swaps, without normalizing framework forks.
3. Customer ownership and portability. Keep content, configuration, templates, assets, and build behavior visible in a normal Hugo repository that the customer can build, host, extend, and take elsewhere.
4. Safe long-term evolution. Make shared changes bounded, inspectable, reversible, compatible, and resistant to consumer drift as a site grows.
5. Measured quality. Treat accessibility, performance, security, progressive enhancement, authoring clarity, and consumer proof as separate gates. The active target is WCAG 2.2 Level AA, with lab and field Core Web Vitals reported separately.
6. Human-first, machine- and AI-operable. Every essential Core job must have a direct, understandable human path with plain-language status, previews, recovery guidance, and explicit consent before writes. Stable JSON contracts and optional AI may accelerate or automate that same path, but neither machine orchestration, AI, nor Foundry Control may be required to use the portable framework.
7. Convergence before expansion. Finish, simplify, adopt, and prove the existing system before adding broad inventory unless a measured customer job cannot be completed through current capabilities.

Non-Negotiable Boundaries

• Foundry Core owns the portable Hugo runtime, public contracts, schemas, manifests, fixtures, themes, Blocks, Sections, inspection, validation, and deterministic human/JSON evidence reports.
• Foundry Control owns identity, permissions, persisted approvals, private business context, managed editing and publishing, operational analytics, provider credentials, communications, automations, and service state.
• Consumer sites own customer facts, content quality, brand assets, deployment configuration, declared extensions, and live operational proof.
• Core must remain useful without Control. Control may add managed value around a site without becoming the hidden source of truth for the portable site.

Current Authorities

• Best Framework Plan — active quality, evidence, WCAG, Web Vitals, and convergence program.
• Foundry Core v1.1 Release Plan — active compatible feature-train scope, toolchain policy, and release gates.
• Foundry Core v1 Release Record — historical decision authority and final v1.0.0 release outcome.
• Project State — current execution position and next action.
• AI Agent Guide — operating sequence and source-of-truth precedence.
• Core/Control Guidestones — product ownership boundary.
• Versioning And Releases — current release facts and release administration rules.

Historical plans and release packets remain evidence of what was decided or proved at a point in time. They are not allowed to override this mission or the current authorities above.