Ever had that moment where you upgrade a tool, open your project, and suddenly half your configuration is unreadable? Maybe it's a binary .dat file from a build tool that changed its serialization format. Maybe it's a proprietary project file that the new version "migrated" into something your teammates on the old version can't open.

I've been dealing with this exact problem for over eight years across different stacks, and I keep arriving at the same conclusion: plain text is the most resilient data format we have, and the further you stray from it, the more pain you're signing up for.

The Root Cause: Format Coupling

The core issue isn't that tools upgrade.…