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 70 ledgers across more than twenty 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.