Concourse's goal is to solve automation, once and for all, without becoming part of the problem.
Concourse should provide concepts that build a strong mental model for the user's project, and this model should remain intuitive as the user's automation requirements grow.
Concepts should precisely outline their motivation and intended workflows. Friction and complexity resulting from the imprecise application of a concept should be a cue to introduce new ideas. (Example)
Concourse should be able to do a lot with a little. New concepts should only be introduced if their intended workflow cannot be precisely expressed in terms of existing concepts.
Concepts should not be highly specialized for one domain or introduce tight coupling to specific technologies. Users should be able to relate to every concept, and their automation should be insulated from the constant churn of the tech industry.
Concourse should prevent anti-patterns and the accumulation of technical debt. Concourse's concepts should make good practices feel intuitive and bad practices feel uncomfortable.
Automation should be self-contained and reproducible in order to maintain business continuity when recovering from disaster scenarios (e.g. total cluster loss). Concourse should merely be a choreographer of mission-critical state kept in an external source of truth, allowing individual installations to be ephemeral.