Non-Goals

The bright lines Chirp will not cross — what the core deliberately won't do, and the honest alternative for each

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Overview

Chirp is a rendering layer, not a kitchen-sink framework. It deliberately leaves some jobs to other tools — an ORM, background jobs, WebSockets, an admin generator — and pairs every "no" with the tool you would reach for instead. This page is the honest map of those bright lines so you can decide whether Chirp fits.

Every non-goal protects one property: the server holds zero per-client view state. A request renders HTML from data fetched for that request, and the server keeps nothing about that client's screen between requests — no server-held component tree, no session-bound view graph, no per-connection UI model. That is why there is structurally nothing for two threads to race over under free-threading (see why zero view state matters under 3.14t).

What Chirp will not do — and what to do instead

The table is the whole answer. Each row is a deliberate bright line plus the tool you would reach for in its place.

Chirp won't… Why Reach for instead
Ship a stateful ORM Sessions, identity maps, and lazy loading reintroduce hidden I/O and per-client mutable state. Shapes (SQL in, frozen dataclasses out), or SQLAlchemy / SQLModel / raw SQL.
Generate an admin / CRUD UI Core's job is content negotiation and rendering, not a generated UI most apps outgrow. Compose return types and chirp-ui components into list/detail/edit flows you own.
Embed email / SMTP Delivery is a separate operational concern with its own retries and providers. Render the body as a Kida template, hand the HTML to a bring-your-own mailer (SES, Postmark, Resend, SMTP).
Run background jobs Task queues need their own durability, retry, and observability. Celery, RQ, Dramatiq, or your platform scheduler — Chirp owns only the progress surface (Suspense / EventStream).
Add a WebSocket return type Almost every "real-time" feature is server-push, which SSE already covers over plain HTTP. EventStream / SSE for server-push; raw WebSockets live below the framework at the ASGI server.
Support WSGI or a lower Python floor The thread-safety story depends on the free-threaded Python 3.14 build. Generic ASGI — Chirp runs on any conforming ASGI server, not one vendor.
Own general HTTP rate limiting Global throttling, IP reputation, and DDoS shaping see traffic Chirp never does. Your proxy / CDN edge (nginx, Cloudflare, gateway). Chirp ships only auth-path lockout.
Become a telemetry / APM product Observability backends are a market Chirp does not compete in. Wire Prometheus, Sentry, or OpenTelemetry through config; bring your own backend.
Absorb a Django-sized ecosystem Chasing breadth dilutes the rendering-layer focus. A small, verifiable surface plus a stable custom contract checks protocol so the ecosystem grows around a stable core.
New in 0.8
How the escape hatches work

Each "instead" above has a real seam in Chirp. The detail below is for the practitioner wiring one of these boundaries; you can score the table without it.

Data layer.Database.fetchreturns typed, frozen dataclasses mapped from rows — data flows toward the screen, fetched for purpose, immutable. The field-level SQL-to-render contract is Shapes; the connection and query mechanics are the database layer.

Background fan-out. For database-driven updates,Database.listen()pairs PostgreSQLLISTEN/NOTIFYwith EventStream so a worker running elsewhere can push HTML updates — Chirp streams them without owning the worker.

Raw WebSockets. If you genuinely need bidirectional WebSockets, the ASGI server handles the connection directly. The Pounce pass-through exposes knobs like websocket_compression and websocket_max_message_size on AppConfig. Chirp does not negotiate a return type into a WebSocket frame.

Auth-path rate limiting. Chirp ships only the lockout that must live next to the login decision:LoginLockout primitives and AuthRateLimitMiddleware (chirp.middleware), with pluggable backends for cross-worker lockout. Everything broader stays at the edge. See auth hardening.

Telemetry. Telemetry is a config surface, not a bundled backend:metrics_enabled andmetrics_path for Prometheus, sentry_dsn for Sentry, and otel_endpoint for OpenTelemetry. You bring the backend; Chirp emits to it.

Ecosystem.register_contract_check and the ContractCheckprotocol let third-party packages extendapp.check()with their own validation rules, so tooling grows around the core rather than inside it.