Essays from Infinity Software Development Group on ADL, the Kalos runtime, and the shape of software specification.https://infinity-sdg.com/en-ushttps://infinity-sdg.com/writing/adl-vs-strapi/https://infinity-sdg.com/writing/adl-vs-strapi/Strapi's content types live as schema files the runtime interprets into a working API — the same bet ADL makes. The fork comes when content needs behavior: Strapi ships one lifecycle and routes every other rule into JavaScript; ADL keeps the rules in the declaration.Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTDescription vs Executionhttps://infinity-sdg.com/writing/adl-vs-saas-headless-cms/https://infinity-sdg.com/writing/adl-vs-saas-headless-cms/Contentful and Storyblok interpret a content model into a working API — no generated code, globally delivered. But the declaration lives in the vendor's cloud, and every rule past field basics smears across webhooks, functions, and every consuming frontend. ADL's counterposition is one artifact in your repo.Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTDescription vs Executionhttps://infinity-sdg.com/writing/adl-vs-wordpress/https://infinity-sdg.com/writing/adl-vs-wordpress/WordPress is the most successful 'describe it and it runs' system ever shipped — and it answered every need past its built-in vocabulary with the plugin economy, until the workaround pile became the platform. ADL's answer to the same demand is the opposite bet: extend the vocabulary, not the code pile.Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTDescription vs Executionhttps://infinity-sdg.com/writing/adl-vs-salesforce/https://infinity-sdg.com/writing/adl-vs-salesforce/Strip the CRM branding and Salesforce is a metadata-driven interpreter — the most successful declarative application platform ever shipped, and the trillion-dollar proof of this series' thesis. It also proves the failure pattern at the same scale: even the richest declared vocabulary ran out, and the overflow became a profession.Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTDescription vs Executionhttps://infinity-sdg.com/writing/c-at-the-door/https://infinity-sdg.com/writing/c-at-the-door/Kalos is a C++20 microkernel that is only a plugin system — the application server assembled entirely from plugins behind a versioned binary boundary. C at the door, disciplined C++ inside; the same bet PHP's extension model made, and why one runtime can reach from the server to the edge.Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTDescription vs Executionhttps://infinity-sdg.com/writing/what-should-the-agents-write/https://infinity-sdg.com/writing/what-should-the-agents-write/'Just have the AI build the whole app' is half right: agents produce running full-stack applications, but AI lowered the cost of producing code without lowering the cost of owning it. The move is to shrink what must be verified — let the agent write a small declared domain and let a tested runtime supply the semantics.Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTDescription vs Executionhttps://infinity-sdg.com/writing/the-spec-that-runs/https://infinity-sdg.com/writing/the-spec-that-runs/Every specification technology sits on one axis — description versus execution. ADL is a bet on the least-traveled path: the spec isn't compiled into an application, it's interpreted as one by the Kalos runtime — so there is no generated code to drift.Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTDescription vs Executionhttps://infinity-sdg.com/writing/adl-vs-bpmn-dmn/https://infinity-sdg.com/writing/adl-vs-bpmn-dmn/This is the one comparison in the series where the other side genuinely executes. A Camunda-class engine doesn't treat a BPMN diagram as documentation — it runs it; a DMN decision table evaluates.Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTDescription vs Executionhttps://infinity-sdg.com/writing/adl-vs-express-step/https://infinity-sdg.com/writing/adl-vs-express-step/Long before "schema-driven" was a pitch, ISO 10303 — STEP — shipped EXPRESS: a declarative modeling language rich enough to describe the geometry of a jet engine, complete with typed entities, inheritance, derived attributes, and formal constraint rules.Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTDescription vs Executionhttps://infinity-sdg.com/writing/adl-vs-graphql/https://infinity-sdg.com/writing/adl-vs-graphql/GraphQL gave clients something genuinely new — a typed schema plus the freedom to shape their own queries. But the SDL is a contract, not an implementation: behind every field sits a hand-written resolver, and behind every mutation sits arbitrary imperative code the schema says nothing about.Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTDescription vs Executionhttps://infinity-sdg.com/writing/adl-vs-openapi/https://infinity-sdg.com/writing/adl-vs-openapi/OpenAPI describes an HTTP surface — paths, payload shapes, auth schemes. It says nothing about what happens when a request arrives: who may make it, in which states, under which business rules.Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTDescription vs Executionhttps://infinity-sdg.com/writing/adl-vs-sql/https://infinity-sdg.com/writing/adl-vs-sql/SQL is the most successful executable specification in software history — you don't describe a table and then build it; the DDL is the table. That's exactly the property ADL wants, which is why this comparison is an inheritance, not a fight.Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTDescription vs Executionhttps://infinity-sdg.com/writing/adl-vs-uml/https://infinity-sdg.com/writing/adl-vs-uml/UML is the cautionary tale that motivates ADL, so this is the article where the series' thesis lives or dies. Model-Driven Architecture — the 2000s dream of generating systems from UML models — failed, comprehensively, and the industry drew the wrong lesson from the wreckage.Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTDescription vs Executionhttps://infinity-sdg.com/writing/adl-vs-json-schema/https://infinity-sdg.com/writing/adl-vs-json-schema/JSON Schema answers exactly one question: is this document well-formed? It's stateless, single-document, and context-free by design — the right properties for validating interchange between strangers, and the wrong ones for validating writes inside an application.Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTDescription vs Executionhttps://infinity-sdg.com/writing/what-adl-cant-express/https://infinity-sdg.com/writing/what-adl-cant-express/Every declarative platform that oversold its boundary died on it — the demo was magical, the tenth requirement didn't fit, the workaround pile grew beside the platform until the pile was the platform.Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTDescription vs Executionhttps://infinity-sdg.com/writing/adl-vs-supabase/https://infinity-sdg.com/writing/adl-vs-supabase/Supabase's API layer is PostgREST — an interpreter, not a generator. It settled the question of whether interpretation belongs in production; what it leaves open is how much the declaration can say before the rest smears across SQL and Edge Functions.Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTDescription vs Executionhttps://infinity-sdg.com/writing/adl-vs-json-server/https://infinity-sdg.com/writing/adl-vs-json-server/json-server proved that an interpreted data file is a working API — for prototypes. ADL is what happens if you refuse to stop at the prototype boundary; the gap between them is the concrete list of things a production backend must be correct about.Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTDescription vs Executionhttps://infinity-sdg.com/writing/adl-vs-jhipster/https://infinity-sdg.com/writing/adl-vs-jhipster/JHipster's JDL is ADL's closest linguistic cousin — entities, relationships, and options declared in a compact DSL. Then the two projects give opposite answers to what the DSL is for: a seed for code you will own, or the application itself, interpreted directly.Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTDescription vs Executionhttps://infinity-sdg.com/writing/guardrails-for-vibe-coding/https://infinity-sdg.com/writing/guardrails-for-vibe-coding/AI writes plausible code at volume, and the errors concentrate exactly where clicking around doesn't reach — authorization, state transitions, validation edges. The fix isn't reviewing faster; it's shrinking what has to be verified. The case for ADL, seeds, and guardrails.Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT