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Anti-Features

This project will not ship the following. Each is a deliberate exclusion, not a "we'll get to it." If you need any of these, wire is not for you — and you should fork rather than file an issue, because we will close the issue.

1. No SaaS dependency

Default reference relay is a convenience. Self-host with wire relay-server. Won't change.

2. No IdP-delegated identity

Your identity is an Ed25519 keypair you generate locally — never an OAuth token, never an IdP account, never a vendor handle. The DID is the key; no login mints it. Won't change.

The one nuance (so this doc doesn't lie about shipped code): an org may optionally stand up an OIDC/SSO channel to mediate the ORG_VERIFIED tier — a faster path to org-membership attestation than the DNS-TXT floor or a hand-built roster, and the enterprise day-one hook. It is opt-in, org-scoped, and a supported 1.0 feature (RFC-001 SSO amendment §H): the wire-side contract (ORG_VERIFIED tier + org_attestation.via provenance) is frozen, while the IdP-integration config evolves only under the deprecation policy. It attests org membership, never identity, and never substitutes for the bilateral wire dial + accept gesture that earns VERIFIED (anti-feature #3). Turn it off and nothing about wire identity changes.

3. No central trust authority

No "verified" badge. No global PKI. Trust is bilateral and earned — wire dial + a bilateral accept, then one-way tier promotion (UNTRUSTED → ORG_VERIFIED → VERIFIED). Org membership eases pairing (DNS-TXT-rooted), never substitutes for the bilateral gesture. Won't change.

4. No crypto tokens, staking, or chain receipts

Bearer-auth on writes is the only access gate. Won't change.

5. No mobile-only / browser-only join

CLI-first. Pairing is a CLI gesture (wire dial + wire accept), not a browser/mobile flow. Reconsider only after 5+ third-party operators ask.

6. No closed-source server

wire-relay-server is AGPL-3.0. Forks that host as SaaS must share back. Won't change.

7. No vendor-cloud lock-in

Defaults work without GitHub, Cloudflare, AWS, Tailscale. cloudflared is OPTIONAL. Won't change.

8. No "agent platform" category positioning

We don't compete with Sierra/Decagon/CrewAI/LangChain. Peer-to-peer signed-message bus, not orchestration suite. Won't change.

9. No "Slack for agents" framing

Slack = human chat, sync expectations, ephemeral retention, central platform. We = append-only signed coordination log for asynchronous machine senders. Won't change.

10. No regulated-industry compliance theater

We do not pursue HIPAA / FedRAMP / EU AI Act / ISO 42001 certifications. Protocol gives evidence (signed JSONL, sig-verifiable, operator-self-host) IF buyers want it. We don't market to them, we don't tailor for them. Won't change.

11. No human-readable audit-log bypass

Events are signed JSONL on disk. Auditor can cat, grep, jq them. We won't move to a binary format. Won't change.

12. No "everyone is our user"

Tribes: self-hosters / homelab; AGPL-pilled / Unix-purist / lobste.rs / p2p-veteran; Anthropic-ecosystem operators with two-laptop coordination needs.

Not tribes: AI-skeptic-but-builder (Ollama orbit serves them), privacy maximalists (cleartext-by-default), crypto/web3, indie hackers (different goals).

Won't change before 1k stars + 5 third-party installs.

13. No native group rooms (yet)

N-agent via mesh-of-bilateral (syncthing pattern). Native group rooms with member-set consensus + cross-member read-receipts + group revocation defer to v0.2+ IF demand surfaces. SyncThing got 73k stars on mesh-of-bilateral alone.

14. No registry at v0.1

Phase 4-A federated AgentCard registry exists in the upstream R&D workspace; not in v0.1 OSS scope. Defer.

15. No file-share at v0.1

Phase 2 file-share above 64KB exists in upstream; not in v0.1 OSS scope. Defer.

16. No COSE_Sign1 envelope wrapping

IETF SCITT compatibility deferred until at least one user explicitly requests it. Won't change pre-1.0.

17. No A2A / AGNTCY / DIDComm bridge at v0.1

Compatibility shims to standards-bodies are out-of-scope for v0.1 OSS. Existed in earlier R&D. Defer.

18. No gh CLI dependency

Install path requires only Python ≥3.10. No GitHub account required. Won't change.

19. No cloudflared at install-time

Self-hosted relay defaults to plain HTTP on localhost; operator chooses ingress. Won't change.

20. No systemd at install-time

Foreground-first. wire daemonize opt-in. Won't change.

21. No cross-agent memory store

wire is transport, not a memory backend. Agents bring their own memory (a vault, a DB, whatever). We won't ship a "structured cross-agent memory" API — the thing BAND (band.ai) gates behind Enterprise and leaves off its own real-time bus, absent from its own core model. A message bus that also owns your agents' memory is two products; we are one. Won't change. (Deliberate divergence — verified against BAND's shipped API, 2026-07-04.)

22. No task boards / kanban / workflow orchestration

No per-room task board, no assignments, no goal tracker. Coordinating what work happens is the agent's job (or its orchestrator's); wire coordinates messages between identities. BAND ships a beta kanban; that's orchestration, a different lane (see #8). Won't change.

23. No governance-UI / policy-engine product

We won't build an approval-queue, a pre-action pause/kill console, or a policy engine as a product surface. wire's honest governance is the signed, verifiable audit trail it already emits (every envelope Ed25519-signed; see #11) — a stronger evidentiary claim than a self-reported event log, and it needs no dashboard to be true. Surfacing that audit queryably is fine; building "governance" theater on spec is not. Won't change pre-1.0.


OSS projects die from scope creep faster than from any other cause. This list is the maintainer's pre-commitment device. Feature requests that violate any item: closed with link to this file.

If your need conflicts — fork. AGPL/Apache/MIT licenses make forks trivial. The point of OSS is that you don't need our permission.