The standard

Adapted from Wendell Berry's nine standards for adopting a new tool ("Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer", 1987). His subject was a farm; the criteria survive the distance because they are about what a tool owes the person who takes it up. Held against magus in both directions: what magus asks of itself before adding anything, and what you should ask of magus before adopting it:

1. Cheaper than what it replaces. Total cost: install, learning, upkeep. One binary, no account, nothing to upsell, no toolchain underneath it to break. The honest half: the learning cost is charged up front, and the claim is cheaper over a year, not cheaper in week one.
2. At least as small in scale. The tool may not outgrow what one person can hold. Enforced today by judgment alone; the ledger that would measure it is a debt, in Where this is strained.
3. Clearly and demonstrably better. A claim of better needs an artifact someone else can check: the benchmark results, committed with the hardware, the date, and the exact competing tool versions they were taken on; terminal recordings that are captured bytes rather than mockups; the drift gate. The claim that querying the graph beats grepping is argued from mechanism and not yet measured; weigh it accordingly.
4. Uses less energy. affected and the cache are this criterion implemented: run only what a change reaches, never do the same work twice. The savings are real and currently invisible; a debt, in Where this is strained.
5. Powered by what the work already produces. Berry said the body's own energy. Here it is the scope test verbatim: every capability reads the model that correctness already forced the build to hold, and the one exception, the release registry, is named there.
6. Repairable by its user. Refusals carry a next step, every diagnostic code has a page, the host wiring is a template you own, no generated code sits between you and a running build, and the guard fails open with a notice rather than failing silent. The systematic version is missing; a debt, in Where this is strained.
7. Repairable near home. The cache is a plain store on your disk, the console is loopback-locked, no capability requires a hosted service, the daemon accelerates and never gates. The exceptions run on infrastructure we operate; Scope names them.
8. From a shop that will take it back. One maintainer, said plainly, and the mitigations are structural rather than social: a sealed engine kept small, documentation written before announcement, GPLv3 so the tool stays repairable in common if the shop ever closes. Choosing Buzz for its maintainers was this criterion applied to a dependency before we had read it stated.
9. Disrupts nothing good that already exists. The terminal's decades of contract stay intact: scrollback, selection, the working directory, plain text, your toolchain visible and yours. The console is where this is under active tension, and it ships under a rule: what does not give genuine value over the good thing that already exists should not ship.