As the GP says, this probably refers to the practice of having short pithy statements to guide decision making. That is, AWS uses "Tenets" to help guide their d

As the GP says, this probably refers to the practice of having short pithy statements to guide decision making. That is, AWS uses "Tenets" to help guide their decision making, Niko found that useful and wanted to do the same thing for Rust. The post you linked to above links to a YouTube video[1] where he describes where the principles came from: some "design tenets" he came up with to help guide design of the async feature in Rust. Later he realized that they weren't specific to the async work, but were more about Rust in general. There has since been a lot of iteration involving others in the Rust community, and he's no longer calling them tenets. And really, if you actually read the principles themselves, do they really sound like they're based on the design tenets that AWS uses? They sound an awful lot like principles that the Rust community has been using, but never articulated before. Maybe some more iteration is necessary, but it doesn't look very sinister. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksSuXNmGZNA&t=2001s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksSuXNmGZNA&t=2001s