Midcore Community: Building in the Open

Why community matters for developer tools

Developer tools are only as good as the workflows they support. And the best way to understand real workflows is to listen to the developers who live them every day.

Since launching the Midcore pilot, we have been building in the open — sharing our roadmap, collecting feedback, and incorporating community contributions into the core product. This is not just a nice-to-have. It is essential for building a tool that actually works for the diverse range of teams and use cases that exist in the real world.

What the community has taught us

Three insights from our early community have fundamentally shaped the product:

1. Offline is not optional. We initially treated offline mode as a nice-to-have feature for air-gapped environments. Community feedback showed us that offline is the primary mode for a significant portion of developers — those on unreliable connections, those in regulated industries, and those who simply prefer not to send code to external services. This insight moved offline from a feature to a core architectural principle.

2. Gates must be configurable. Our initial gate system was rigid — the same 25 gates for every project. The community quickly showed us that different teams have different quality bars. A prototype does not need the same verification as a production deployment. This led to the delivery tier system: prototype (8 gates), pilot (16 gates), and production (25+ gates).

3. Model choice is political. Choosing which AI model to support is not just a technical decision. It is a decision about vendor lock-in, data sovereignty, and cost control. Teams want the freedom to use the model that fits their constraints — whether that is a local open-source model, a corporate API, or a frontier cloud model. BYOM emerged directly from this feedback.

How to get involved

The Midcore community is growing, and there are many ways to contribute:

• GitHub Issues: Report bugs, request features, or propose improvements. Every issue gets a response within 48 hours.
• Discord: Join the conversation. Share your workflows, ask questions, and connect with other builders.
• Documentation: Help improve our docs. Found something confusing? Submit a PR.
• Gate Definitions: Propose new gates that would catch issues your team cares about. The best community gates get promoted to the default gate set.

We are building the future of software delivery together. Your experience, your frustrations, and your ideas are what make this tool better for everyone.