MISSION

What Dipole Will Deliver

Dipole’s mission is to provide a modern, ergonomic debugger and performance exploration tool for Apple Silicon, built with Zig and guided by clarity, simplicity, and pedagogy. It will grow to serve both practical debugging and teaching, without sacrificing either.

Dipole operates at the intersection of debugging, performance, and learning. Its mission is threefold:

1. Build a Practical, High-Quality Debugger

Design intent: a clean, reliable, architecture-aware experience with clear CLI/TUI ergonomics, robust inspection, registers/memory/symbols/stack visibility, and solid stepping/breakpoints. These capabilities are future-facing; v0.2 delivers a semantic core and read-only consumers, not a full debugger surface yet.

2. Teach People How Systems Work

Dipole is a pedagogical instrument. It aims to make internal mechanisms visible and understandable: stack frames, syscalls, instructions, memory layout, process/thread state. In v0.2, this mission advances via event-sourced truth, pure semantic projections, and read-only semantic outputs (Frames) that are deterministic and replayable.

3. Demonstrate Human + Machine Collaboration

Dipole is built with disciplined human reasoning, supported by LLM-augmented exploration, modeling responsible collaboration. The project itself is a case study in combining human insight with machine assistance.

MVP 0.1 (Historical, Complete)

The first milestone (v0.1) delivered:

Process enumeration and attach on macOS
Minimal state readout
Clean CLI output
Early “dipoledb” traces/snapshots scaffold
Tested, structured Zig codebase

How v0.2 Advances the Mission

v0.2 is architecturally sealed:

Event-sourced truth (TS1)
Pure semantic projections and registry (TS2)
Semantic feed producing Frames for read-only consumers (TS3)
Minimal, non-authoritative intent (intent.ping) proving the control path (TS4)
CLI semantic commands: list/show/eval/render
Deterministic replay; no tmux runtime, no IPC, no LLDB passthrough

This semantic core establishes trustworthy, replayable meaning as the foundation for future debugger features and pedagogical views.

Long-Term Mission (Future Intent)

Dipole will grow into:

A full native backend (dipoledb)
Rich TUI/overlays and optional browser visualizations
Sampling/performance analysis for Apple Silicon
Deeper integration with Zig, C, and research tooling
An educational platform for systems programming

These are design goals, not v0.2 capabilities.

Dipole exists to empower understanding — for those who debug, those who learn, and those who build the next generation of systems.