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-# forge
+# Forge
+
+## Why Forge?
+
+CSS is powerful, but hostile to humans at scale.
+
+### Problems with CSS
+
+- Styles are **global and open** — anything can override anything.
+- There’s **no link** between a class in markup and its definition.
+- Inline styles exist because there’s **no structured way to vary styles per instance**.
+- Overrides are silent — conflicts happen without feedback.
+- Complex components require selector gymnastics and reach-in styling.
+
+### What Forge Does Instead
+
+- Styles are **local to components** and attached by generated handles, not strings.
+- **Parts** give components named sub-targets without selectors.
+- **Variants** replace inline styles with typed, declarative parameters.
+- Style composition is **deterministic** (known merge order, last-wins).
+- Overlapping changes are **warned about in dev**, not silently ignored.
+
+### What Forge Is
+
+- A typed, local, variant-driven way to author CSS.
+- A system that optimizes for **people typing at a keyboard**, not selectors in a cascade.
+
+### What Forge Is Not
+
+- Not a new component model.
+- Not a new language.
+- Not a CSS replacement — it compiles _to_ CSS, but removes the chaos.
 
 Example: