A rented model, and five months of everything else.
The interesting part of this setup is not the part that cost money. It is the part that had to be written, one problem at a time, by someone who is not a developer.
The model is Claude, made by Anthropic. It is a commercial product and anyone can rent it by the month. It runs inside the desktop application Anthropic ships, which is what gives it a terminal, a file system, and the ability to actually do things rather than only describe them. None of that is unusual and none of it was built here.
What was built here is everything that turns a capable stranger into something that knows this house: the rules it reads before it starts, the notes it keeps, the procedures it follows, and the gate it has to pass through before it changes anything real.
Off the shelf
- The model
- Claude, from Anthropic. Rented by the month, same as anyone else
- The application
- The desktop app Anthropic ships, which gives the model a terminal and a file system
- The standard tools
- Reading files, running commands, searching the web
Built here
- The rules
- Read at the start of every session, before anything else happens
- The notes
- One file per thing, holding how that thing actually works
- The procedures
- Written once, followed the same way every time
- The triggers
- Fire on their own at the start and end of a session
- The gate
- Nothing irreversible happens without approval
What a session actually is
The common picture of working with one of these tools is a chat window: you ask, it answers, you close the tab, and everything it worked out disappears with it. That is not what happens here, and the difference is most of the point.
- Rules loadBefore a word is read, the standing rules and the notes for whatever subject this is come into the session
- The askA question or a job, in plain language
- WorkReading, running, checking. Its own findings get checked against what is actually running, not assumed
- The gateAnything irreversible stops here and waits
- Write it downWhat was learned goes back into the notes, so the next session starts further along than this one did
The gate
The single most important rule is the dullest one. Anything that cannot be easily undone — deleting, overwriting, publishing, sending, spending — stops and asks first. It does not get to decide that a thing is safe because it intends to be careful, and it does not get to mark its own work as finished. Approval is a person’s job, every time.
That rule is worth more than any capability on this page. A setup that can reach real systems and does not stop is not impressive, it is a liability with good manners. What makes this one usable in practice is the standing list of things it refuses to do unsupervised, and how that list got written.
What this page is not
Three things named above have their own sections, because each is bigger than a paragraph and this page would go wrong trying to summarize them.