How it works

372 developer tools across 8 families, drawn four ways. It is a wiki in a Git repo: anyone can open a pull request, and the history of every dot is public.

The four views

• Compass. Developer ergonomics west to east, complexity and production parity south to north. A tool earns 10 points per criterion it meets on each axis.
• Adoption Radar. Rings from release and maturity signals: Adopt, Trial, Assess, Hold. Each tool links its evidence.
• Lab. A periodic table of the same tools. The formula on each tile is its two Compass scores.
• Journeys. Seven levels from your first lockfile to platform architect, walked by three tracks.

Want the commands, not the scores? cmd.flisk.sh compares what you type for the same job, tool by tool. Tools that are on both sites link across.

Every view has sub-tabs, and each sub-tab has its own address, so you can share exactly what you are looking at. Hover or focus a tool for details. Click up to 5 tools in any view to compare them side by side. Your picks are kept in the address, so you can share a comparison. Logos come from Simple Icons (CC0) and project GitHub organizations; they belong to their owners.

Honesty rules

• Nobody places a dot by hand. Positions come from the checklist below. To move a dot, change the checklist entries for that tool and say why.
• Flisk is on the map like everyone else. Flisk publishes the site, so it gets no special color, size or position. It sits in Assess because its first release was in October 2026, which is what the rule says.
• Flisk appears only where it works. Journeys shows Flisk on a level only where it does the job today or part of it. The gaps are tracked in the Flisk repo.
• The first dataset was written in October 2026, with AI-assisted research. Expect mistakes. Fixes are welcome.

The checklist

Developer ergonomics (Friction-heavy → Smooth and fast)

• one-command One command starts it. A single command brings up the whole thing it manages.
• zero-config Works with little config. Useful out of the box, or with a short generated config.
• fast-feedback Fast feedback on change. Live reload, file sync or incremental rebuilds in seconds.
• clear-errors Clear errors and diagnostics. Says what broke and how to fix it, or ships a doctor-style check.
• ui Built-in UI. A web dashboard, TUI or desktop app, not only raw logs.
• docs Quickstart in minutes. Official docs get a newcomer to a working result in about ten minutes.
• cross-platform macOS, Linux and Windows. Supported on all three, natively or through WSL.
• offline Local, no account. Runs on your machine without signing up or a network round trip.
• light Light and quick to start. Starts in seconds and does not need a large VM or many GB of RAM.
• agent-ready Agent-ready. An MCP server, a JSON output mode or an API an AI agent can drive.

Complexity and production parity (Single service, quick start → Complex multi-service, deep parity)

• containers Real containers. Runs or builds OCI containers.
• multi-service Many services at once. Brings up and coordinates several services together.
• networking Prod-like networking. Service-to-service networking, DNS or ingress like production.
• state Real stateful dependencies. Databases, queues or volumes, not only in-memory fakes.
• prod-artifacts Same artifacts as production. Uses the images, bundles or lockfiles that production uses.
• k8s Kubernetes semantics. Manifests, pods, Helm charts or a real Kubernetes API.
• cloud-apis Cloud APIs. Emulates or reaches real cloud provider APIs.
• config-secrets Prod-like config and secrets. Environment, config and secrets handled the way production handles them.
• observability Logs, metrics and traces. Exposes telemetry the way production does.
• team-scale Scales to big teams. Built for many services and many developers sharing a setup.

Rings

• Adopt. Stable (1.0 or later, or long-standing), a release in the last 6 months, widely used.
• Trial. Pre-1.0 and actively released, stable but quiet (last release 6 to 18 months ago), or not widely used yet.
• Assess. New or experimental, first release less than a year ago.
• Hold. Archived, deprecated, or no release in 18 months or more.

Fix or add a tool

Tools live in _data/tools/<family>.yml. Edit the file on GitHub, or run ruby scripts/check-data.rb locally before opening a pull request. The contributing guide has the format.

Who decides? For now the maintainers of flisk-sh/roadmap review pull requests against the rules above. If you want to help edit, say so in an issue.