Principles

A short list of the beliefs Hanji is built on. When a decision is hard, these break the tie.

• Git is the store. The repository is the source of truth. The index is a cache we can throw away and rebuild at any time. Anything we cannot rebuild from git, we do not trust.
• The human never meets git. Reading and writing should feel like a good editorial tool. Commits, branches, and conflicts are plumbing, and plumbing stays behind the wall until someone goes looking for it.
• Agents are first-class readers. More than half of documentation is now read by machines. Hanji treats an agent as a reader with an identity and a scope, the same as a person, and lets it propose rather than overwrite.
• No bundled intelligence. We do not sell you a model or meter your tokens. Bring the agent you already trust. Your bill does not grow because your team wrote more this month.
• Permissions are honest about their limits. We say plainly what a lock protects and what it leaves open. A promise we cannot keep is worse than no promise.
• Byte-fidelity. A one-word edit produces a one-line change. Your history stays readable because the tool refuses to rewrite what you did not touch.

None of these is novel on its own. Holding all of them at once, and refusing to trade one away for a feature, is the point.