Design Journal

Building ConnectOnion

Design decisions, lessons learned, and the thinking behind the framework.

Designing the Network Protocol

From Complexity to Clarity

The Story Behind ConnectOnion's Authentication Keyword

Functions Need Verbs

The Power of User Mental Models

Why Hex-Encoded Public Keys

The Power of Precise Naming

Simplicity First, Power When Needed

Writing in public

How we built the eval system — session replay without adding a line of user code

The trust model — why agent-to-agent auth is harder than you think

Plugin architecture internals — hooks, lifecycle, and the 9 event types