Notes
Week 1: From Pair Programming to Delegation
I was given six months of a Claude subscription through the Claude for Open Source program, and I spent the first two and a half weeks building a small agent factory. Here is what actually happened, including the five things that broke.
Week 2: Putting the Agents on Kairos
Last week I wrote that the next step was pointing my agents at Kairos itself. This is the first week of that, including the release gate I had been putting off, the migration that broke a working setup, and the reviews that are wearing me down.
Week 3: Shipping Kairos 4.2.0
4.2.0 shipped, reset works again on non-UKI systems, fork pull requests finally get CI, and a reviewer agent now reads every change before I do. 34 changes landed against Kairos this week, up from 19.
Week 4: Opening RISC-V to the Community
riscv64 opened to community testing and now builds on every push, and a due date on an internal ticket reaches my phone as a reminder. I also went from watching every lane to running one myself while the rest trigger on their own.
Week 5: Running It Without SSH
I lost SSH access to the machine running the factory while traveling for a wedding, and every ticket still got delivered without it. Also this week: Kairos reached 100% on the OpenSSF Best Practices badge, and the mark that disclosed AI involvement on two of my repos turned out not to survive merging.
Week 6: Hands on the Hardware
The lab's netboot server moved from my Mac to a Linux box, and the only thing I did myself was point DNS at the new machine. A StarFive VisionFive 2 took the riscv64 image as far as GRUB on real silicon. Also this week: three postmortems, all about the same leak.
Week 7: Capable Enough to Break Things
Seventy-one CI checks passed, I merged, and every new pull request went red. The factory did not notice; a person did. The fix was open in two and a half hours and merged in under four, every step past the first one gated by a human. Plus 38 changes to the factory itself, including a database that watches the agents and a circuit breaker whose first version failed open.
Week 8: Looking at Another Factory
Eight weeks in, a third of the subscription is spent, so it is time to decide whether to keep going or pivot. This week I toured uzi, Vlad Mocanu's dark factory, and started trying it out. The post covers the vocabulary I re-read before that meeting, where each factory puts the human, and why I see a good fit in running both instead of replacing Mission Control, depending on how well uzi fits my workflow.
Week 9: Noj Got Faster Than Its Human Gate
Every piece of process Noj added this week routes through me, and the list of things waiting on me went from 19 to 27 in seven days. Phased tickets, ticket dependencies, and two tickets that ran out of rounds and came back to me as designed. Plus what happened on my toy apps when I stopped reviewing.
Week 10: Noj Merges Its Own Pull Requests in More Repos
In week 9 agents were allowed to merge their own pull requests on one toy app. That breaks part of what was set out for this project at the start, but it was kept and extended to more repos. It has not been done for the Kairos work.