TLDR - The Manual We Hope You Don’t Need
If Carbon needs a manual, we missed something
Carbon Standalone is designed to feel less like traditional software and more like a real-time creative environment—something you explore, experiment with, and learn by doing.
In other words: it’s closer to a game than a manual-driven tool.
Think about the last great game you played. You probably didn’t open a 40-page PDF before you started. You clicked, moved, tried things, made mistakes, and figured it out. Carbon is built with that same philosophy.
If you need a detailed step-by-step guide just to get moving, that’s not a documentation problem—that’s a UX problem. And we want to know about it.
Why There Isn’t a Full Manual (Yet)
Carbon Standalone is still early—and that’s intentional.
For the Founder’s Edition, our goal isn’t just to ship features. It’s to learn:
What feels intuitive immediately
What requires explanation
Where the interface breaks your flow
Where you stop and think, “Wait… how does this work?”
If we wrote a comprehensive manual right now, we’d risk:
Explaining around design problems instead of fixing them
Training users to work against the interface
Missing opportunities to make Carbon fundamentally better
Instead, we’re letting the product speak first.
When You Get Stuck — That’s Valuable
If you find yourself:
Unsure what a tool does
Wondering where a feature lives
Guessing instead of knowing
Watching a tutorial just to understand a basic action
That’s exactly the feedback we want.
Those moments are signals. They tell us where Carbon isn’t living up to its promise of being intuitive, playful, and fast.
Help Us Find the Shortfalls
We invite all Founder’s Edition users to tell us:
What felt confusing
What wasn’t where you expected it to be
What required trial-and-error when it shouldn’t have
What you had to “learn” instead of just doing
👉 Submit your feedback using this form: (link to feedback form)
Even small friction points matter. Especially the small ones.
What Comes Next
This isn’t us saying “there will never be documentation.”
As Carbon matures, we will create:
Clear reference material
Advanced workflow guides
Deep-dive technical documentation
But those documents should explain power, not compensate for confusion.
Right now, this phase is about shaping Carbon into something that doesn’t need a manual to feel natural.
Thanks for helping us build it that way.
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