Why we're building Marula#

The canonical positioning narrative is MANIFESTO.md. Per the standing decision, it is quoted verbatim below — never re-synthesized, re-toned, or paraphrased. The public website quotes it the same way.

The narrative, verbatim#

Why we're building Marula#

I nearly got fired over time entry.

That's the honest place to start. The work was getting done. Tickets closed, clients served, fires put out. What I couldn't do was fight the software and win. Working a note into a ticket took four separate screens. Time entry moved slower than the fixes it described, and the hours kept slipping until somebody noticed. Dispatch had what a scheduler actually needs, buried behind tabs nobody reopens on purpose. Everyone around me was good at their job. The tools made all of us look like the problem.

There had to be a better way. People say that a lot in this industry, and then go back to the system. I decided to actually build it.

A ticket should take one screen, not three. Notes, timer, conversation, calendar live in the same view, because they are the same job. The timer follows you across tickets and stops cleanly, and the rough notes become a proper time entry.

And when you're mid-ticket and you need the answer from the docs, you don't have to go search somewhere else. You ask. The agent reads from your knowledge base and the client's own documentation. It knows who the ticket is for, what is actually in that client's environment, and how your company handles this kind of problem.

The agent isn't a chatbot bolted to the side - it's that old L3 who's been here since the company was a three-man shop. Dispatch gets the same boost, with intelligent suggestions based on what's actually happening with a ticket. Humans need to make the human decisions, but AI makes the mechanical things go faster.

The core is open source. Host it yourself, fork it, break it, rebuild it. You can leave with your whole system on any given day and you can extend it any which way and make it entirely your own. I know the Rewst guy in your office is salivating thinking about the possibilities.

Honestly, I just don't want to have to see another ADHD-brain tech suffer like I have. If no tech ever has to see that PSA that starts with a 'C' ever again, we'll have succeeded.

How the narrative shows up in the product#

• One screen, not three — the instant-first interaction doctrine (explanation) is the engineering form of the manifesto's first promise.
• The agent reads your docs — the agent platform spec (docs/10-agent-platform.md) turns "you ask" into skills, provenance, safety invariants.
• Leave any day — the upgrade compatibility policy and the read model are the mechanical form of ownership: your data, your views, your exit.