We’re building 21st-century machines with 20th-century tools and workflows.

‍

I’ve seen this firsthand on factory floors, in mission control rooms, and inside the engineering teams building some of the most advanced machines in the world. They’re working on spacecraft, autonomous vehicles, hypersonic platforms. These teams are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible, but the tools they use to understand and operate these machines haven’t kept up.

Telemetry is scattered. Testing is brittle. Debugging is manual. Knowledge lives in people’s heads or buried in dashboards. The systems we rely on to make decisions are disconnected from the systems generating the data.

And that’s a problem. Because the machines being built today, and the ones coming next, can’t be understood with log files and dashboards. ‍

That’s why we started Sift. 

Not to make better versions of old tools. Not to do more of the same. But to rethink what engineering infrastructure should look like when the stakes are high, the data is massive, and failure isn’t just expensive—it’s unacceptable.

This manifesto is a line in the sand. It lays out the core ideas behind what we’re building:

• That visibility into how systems behave isn’t a feature, it’s the foundation.
• That CI/CD for hardware isn’t a metaphor. It’s a necessity.
• That engineers shouldn’t be stuck manually reviewing thousands of test logs, they should be working with real-time insight at every stage of the machine lifecycle.
• And that AI has a place in this future but only if it’s human composable, deterministic, and governed with the same rigor we bring to everything else in these systems.

‍

We call it Machine Without Limits and it’s just as much about the machine that builds the machine.

‍

If we want systems to be more resilient, more autonomous, and more capable then we need to rethink the infrastructure engineers rely on to design, test, and operate them. Not better dashboards. Not more telemetry. But the foundation that lets teams understand complexity at scale and move fast without losing confidence.

This is the first time we’ve laid it all out. What we believe. Where we’re going. And what we think needs to change. 

If you’re building the next generation of machines on orbit, in the air, on the ground, or under the sea, I hope this resonates. Because we’re building Sift for you.

Read the manifesto. Share it with your team. Let’s get to work.

-Karthik