# Just read description

I got tired of local microservices turning into a pile of Dockerfiles, Compose files, and nginx configs that nobody wants to maintain. Agents are worse at it than people. They rewrite a Dockerfile, break the Tiltfile, and burn a bunch of tokens fixing plumbing instead of the app.
So I built TDK CLI. You keep one service.json next to each service. tdk up generates the local runtime and starts it. Docker runs the containers. Tilt live-reloads them. No local Kubernetes.
you keep                         tdk up writes                  what runs
--------                         -------------                  ---------

services/orders-api/             .autogenerated/                Docker
  service.json  -- tdk up -->      Dockerfile                     |
  src/                               Tiltfile                      v
                                     Traefik routes            Tilt watches
                                                                  |
                                                                  v
                                                          api.shop.localhost
A small shop stack looks like this:
                         tdk up shop
                              |
          +-------------------+-------------------+
          |                   |                   |
     orders-api          storefront            postgres
          |                   |                   |
          +-------------------+-------------------+
                              |
                           Traefik
                              |
                     *.shop.localhost
The shortest loop:
mkdir shop && cd shop
tdk project --yes
tdk resource orders-api --type backend --stack shop --yes
tdk up shop --dry-run
tdk up shop
tdk doctor checks Docker, Tilt, and ports. tdk ui is a terminal dashboard for the running services. tdk config verify catches drift if someone hand-edits a generated file.
It is local dev only. Production stays on Helm, Argo CD, or Kustomize. Core is MIT and does not need a key. You need Docker and Tilt. macOS and Linux work directly. Windows needs WSL2 Ubuntu. Native Windows can inspect, not start the stack.
Repo: https://github.com/tdk-landscape/tdk-cli-core
If Compose or Tilt already works for you, would a service.json still be worth it, or is that just another file to keep in sync?