Principles
Governing principles
Section titled “Governing principles”The internet was meant to be decentralized, and is largely built using free and open source software and protocols. The technology for controlling your own internet stuff exists but isn’t easy to use, while proprietary software services make things easy to set up but are not portable (and you become someone else’s product).
FOSS > simplicity > flexibility
composition > inheritance
About the authors
Section titled “About the authors”I am a musician and software developer. I’ve had some public websites and run them on personal servers, shared Linux hosting, shared hosting with “easy” wordpress management, Azure App Services, and like, Tumblr. Setting these up and migrating from one to another or maintaining multiple sites in different ways has been annoying. It makes it less fun and makes it harder to want to build new things.
Daps is an idea to abstract deployment, site management and migration into essential workflows within a common environment that’s as nonproprietary as practical. I built it with a lot of help from first Codex and now Claude. Those are extremely proprietary and I’m aware of the irony. Ideally Daps is easy to use without an LLM, but who are we kidding.
I want to use Daps to build new things and have the deployment pieces “solved.”
Claude
Section titled “Claude”An LLM by Anthropic. I (Louis) act like its product owner and lead, designing the overall project, writing and architecting some code myself, but mostly planning with and delegating to Claude. Then I review the results before checking them into the repository.
An LLM by OpenAI, was used early on in Daps development (January-March 2026 or so).