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March 16, 2026

# This Is Not Stable Software

## The Honest Version

The Other Dude is under very active development. Things break. Features move around. APIs change without warning. The docs are sometimes wrong about things that changed yesterday.

That's not an apology. That's just what building software in the open looks like.

## Why It's Like This On Purpose

When you lock down software too early, bad decisions become load-bearing walls. Anyone who's operated infrastructure tools long enough has watched that happen — some terrible design choice from 2014 that nobody can remove because three other things depend on it.

So for now the goal is simple: move fast, test ideas, throw away the ones that turn out to be wrong. Some parts of the system might change several times before they settle into the shape they're supposed to have. That's normal at this stage. That's the point.

## What This Actually Is

For anyone who wandered in from a search engine: The Other Dude is a platform for managing fleets of MikroTik RouterOS devices.

Not one router. Dozens or hundreds of them, managed as a system.

Configuration history. Drift detection. Safe configuration pushes. Fleet-wide visibility. The kinds of problems that don't get solved by opening more SSH sessions.

## Version 11 Is Where It Changes

Version 11 will be the first release I consider a real release. Not because the number is magical, but because by that point the architecture should be stable enough to start caring about things like predictable upgrades, backward compatibility, documentation that stays accurate for more than a week, and not breaking users every other update.

Right now those things are secondary. The architecture still needs room to evolve. Locking it down now would be doing you a disservice later.

## Who Should Use This Today

People who like watching systems get built in public. People who are curious about the design. People who enjoy experimenting with unfinished software and don't panic when something changes.

If that sounds like you, welcome. You're the target audience right now.

## Who Should Probably Wait

Anyone who needs something stable today. Anyone who expects upgrades to never break anything. Anyone who wants polished software with guarantees attached.

That version is coming. Just not yet.

## The Bottom Line

The project is still being shaped. Shaping systems properly takes a little chaos before things settle down. If you're the kind of engineer who enjoys watching that process happen, stick around.

Version 11 will eventually show up. When it does, that's when the boring work of stability begins.

The Other Dude is open source MikroTik fleet management — read the docs or view on GitHub.