Most teams don’t actually have a "speed" problem. They have a change fear problem.
Not because people are timid, but because the system doesn’t make truth cheap. When a change lands, nobody can quickly answer the questions that matter: What did we intend? What did we break? How do we know? What’s the smallest experiment that falsifies the wrong path?
The Centaur Manifest is a direct response to that reality. It’s not a manifest about hype. It’s a compact operating doctrine for small, high-leverage teams that want to move fast and stay coherent - especially when AI agents can multiply both throughput and variance.
https://pkt.systems/centaur.md
The punchline
There’s a framing that lands with both engineers and executives because it maps to what buyers already value:
What you want is not "more automation" and it’s not "more process." You want self-verifying systems - software designed so meaningful behavior can be exercised deterministically, observed precisely, and falsified quickly. The value is simple and brutal: you can change the system without breaking it, and you can do that with fewer people.
That’s the Centaur Manifest’s center of gravity.
It pushes you away from outer-loop, slow, environment-heavy feedback (the kind that makes organizations feel safe while staying slow), and toward inner-loop, high-signal feedback - fast enough that humans and agents can run it repeatedly until reality agrees.
Why this matters even more with AI
AI increases two things at once: output and entropy.
You can generate more code, explore more solutions, and iterate more rapidly. But you can also generate more subtle regressions, more integration drift, more "it compiled, ship it" optimism. The Centaur approach doesn’t deny the speed; it makes speed safe by insisting that evidence dominates assertion.
The Manifest is essentially saying: if execution is cheap, then proof becomes the product. Not proofs in the academic sense - proofs in the engineering sense: executable evidence, crisp invariants, and fast falsification.
Make it legible as architecture, not "tooling"
If you pitch this wrong, people will mentally file it under "testing," "CI," or "DevOps." That’s a category error.
The Manifest is about architecture and feedback topology: how you shape seams, interfaces, and invariants so the system becomes easy to exercise, easy to observe, and hard to accidentally break. In practice, it’s the difference between a system that demands committees to feel safe and a system that produces evidence to be safe.
That’s why the centaur framing is powerful: it doesn’t require a giant transformation. It’s a way for a small unit to operate with high integrity and high velocity inside any organization.
What you get if you adopt the doctrine
You don’t "implement the Centaur Manifest." You start behaving like it’s true, and the organization notices the results.
The result looks like this: tighter intent, fewer coordination handoffs, less review drama, fewer brittle releases, faster onboarding, and a dramatic drop in the cost of answering "are we sure?" It’s not that you eliminate risk; you eliminate unknown risk by making verification routine.
And yes - this is exactly what makes AI agents genuinely useful. Agents are strong when the loop is runnable, deterministic, and diagnostic. The Manifest is a blueprint for building that kind of loop into how you ship.
Use it as a wedge
Read the Centaur Manifest and share it with whoever owns delivery quality (tech lead, architect, product lead). Then pick one subsystem and make it "centaur-ready": embeddable flows, deterministic tests, executable contracts, and telemetry that answers real questions.
That’s how the doctrine wins: not with slogans, but with a visible before/after in how safely and quickly you can change a real system.
The Centaur Manifest is short on purpose. It’s meant to be portable, quotable, and operational.