method

How I work

I operate crews of AI agents the way a company operates engineers: isolated workers, a visible board, a supervisor who can watch, speak to and stop each one, and an operating record where every session ends in a verdict.

Six mechanisms, each one a thing in the repository rather than a principle on a slide. They exist because agent work fails in a specific way: it looks finished long before it is checked.

Three of the systems this method runs on are written up as case studies — the method applied rather than described. The full register of seven is on the front page.

six mechanisms

What the structure actually is

Each row names a mechanism and the failure it exists to prevent. The evidence is not on this page — it is on the page each row links to.

board

Work is a work package, not a conversation. Every session's findings land on the board as items with an ID and a state. The public view on now renders the count of open items and the titles its filter allows through; the rest stay on the board, visible to the supervisor, not dropped. A backlog nobody can see is a rumour — an open count you can look at is a control.

lanes

One coordinator per session; workers do not merge. Each worker is spawned into an isolated worktree on its own branch. It commits to its lane and stops there. The coordinator merges, so the merge is the only place two lanes ever meet — and the only place one lane's change becomes every lane's problem.

verdicts

Every session ends in a verdict. Three fields, always in the same order: what changed, what was verified, what remains — then a verdict. “Done” is not a status a worker can award itself, because a claim without a verification is just optimism with a timestamp.

gates

Two mechanical gates stand between work and publication. One reads the prose and refuses identifiers, real project names, money claims and hype. One reads the repositories and fails if any of them is readable from outside. Both are scripts in the repository, and neither can be argued with at 2am. The codenames on this site are the first gate's output, not a writing style.

audits

Infrastructure is audited on a cadence, read-only, with verdicts. Each wave is a read-only sweep, and each report opens with a verdict: clean, suspect or critical. The failures an audit finds are usually the quiet ones — the ones that never page, because nothing was watching for them. When one becomes an incident, it ends up in the post-mortems.

freeze

The published tree is frozen by hash. The deploy tree carries a hash. A lane that changes it proves the hash moved, and the check fails loudly instead of trusting a diff review. Published bytes are verifiable bytes, or they are not published.

where to check

The mechanism leaves a trace

A method that cannot be inspected is a preference. Each of these is a page on this site, rendered from its own source — none of them asks you to take the claim on faith.

board

Now publishes the board's open count and the items the filter allows through. Items carry a status, not just a title.

notes

Field notes are counted on the page — one codename per note, never a real project name, with a feed you can subscribe to.

post-mortems

Post-mortems are written after the fact and each carries the change that followed — plus the line about what it taught the method.

dashboards

Infra embeds the public dashboards, read-only. They refresh on their own; nothing there is a screenshot.

dataset

Stats renders every figure from one recorded dataset, with the window stated. No hand-typed numbers, no forecast.

contributions

Contributions separates the one project whose maintainers reviewed and merged my work from the fork I hardened for my own fleet — and says which is which instead of blurring them.

limits what this is not

What this is not

Not a claim that the agents run themselves. The autonomy is in the workers; the discipline is in the structure around them. A crew without a supervisor is an outage with a schedule.

Not a claim of scale I have not measured. Where a number appears on this site it is counted from a recorded source, and the source is named next to it.

Not a claim that the verdict convention is mechanised end to end. The gates and the freeze are scripts; the reporting contract is a convention with a merge gate behind it.

Not a complete record: 4 published post-mortems, and a board that still lists open items — including the ones nobody has closed yet.

Read a post-mortem What is open now