This project started by me making lists of what my "ultimate laptop" would and wouldn't have. My ultimate laptop would have:

• Very long battery life (I have an irrational hatred of plugging things in to charge)
• Hackable design (GPIOs exposed, modular motherboard, sensors, open hardware & software)
• Robust SSH, preferably something like mosh, to connect to a beefy server somewhere else
  • Even better would be a complete local (albeit underpowered) Linux/POSIX environment for small tasks without Internet
• E-ink display (they're great for ebooks, why not for other text?)
  • There are some interesting bi-color E-ink displays now. That would allow some coloring for e.g. minimalist syntax highlighting.
• USB-C with introspection (PD Buddy Sink built in)
• Cool form factor (only 90's kids will remember the lunchbox computer from Codename K.N.D.)
• Mechanical keyboard (a DIY keyboard is needed to fit the profile of the lunchbox lid, so might as well buy a bag of Cherry MX Browns and heat up the soldering iron)

And as with any project it is important to define non-goals. In this case they almost describe the project better than the goals:

• Graphics (other than a terminal)
• Gaming (other than Zork ;) )
• Thinness (ruggedness is more important, e.g. old Thinkpads)
• Local performance (an SSH session takes little bandwidth & at least 2G data coverage is widespread enough that hard tasks can almost always be offloaded to a cloud server or home PC)
• Usability as a "normal" computer (it obviously won't run Windows, and it probably won't even support X, so it is limited to terminal apps)

Of course, many of these non-goals could still be achieved by a motivated enough hacker. For instance, I don't plan on writing a driver for the Hall effect sensor in the ESP32, but if someone needed one they could. Someone probably could run X on it given enough effort, it just isn't a priority for me.