Our basic premise is that AI application development should be config-based, so you can track the prompts, models and model parameters being used more rigorously. Having this AI artifact then lets you iterate on it separately from your application code, and also set up evals that provide "test coverage" for the gen AI parts of your application.
We were also inspired by the ipynb format for Jupyter notebooks, and you'll see parallels to that in the aiconfig format.
Please ask any questions, and share your thoughts on config vs. code.