Foreman

Most of what’s on this site gets built by a dev team that isn’t people: headless AI worker sessions, orchestrated by a foreman. An idea graduates into a work ledger — one markdown file holding its goal, ground rules, definition of done and a running log — and that ledger is the only state there is. The foreman spawns a worker on it, matures the same session over days, and drift-checks every report against the ledger’s goal before nudging again. There is no queue and no scheduler daemon; that version was built once and deliberately retired.

Supervision happens from the phone, through a deliberately read-mostly console. Its core design call is truthfulness: “the ledger says active” and “a worker is actually running” are not the same thing, and the UI never pretends they are. Each worker is visible as a lifecycle — hired, working, approved-done, retired — with the approval gate explicit. When a job needs hardware the orchestrating machine doesn’t have (Windows builds, say), it push-dispatches a worker onto another of my machines over SSH; still one dispatcher, still the ledger as the only state.

At the moment that’s around 60 ledgers across 18 project groups, including this blog’s own maintenance. The honest limits: every publish still passes a human gate, workers really do drift (the drift-check exists because it must), and anything that needs human eyes — judging a UI, tasting the result — stays human. The principle: agents move the work; I handle exceptions.

A first version of this page — the wording will get another pass.