Two rules sit at the center of a governance runtime I've been building: when in doubt, the answer is no, and the record is written before anything happens. Here's what they mean in practice, and why they matter more as agents start taking real actions.
Architecture · Security · Agents7 min read
Why I still build products against a one-day clock, and the habits that make it work: cutting scope hard, using the same stack every time, letting agents do the heavy lifting, leaning on a design system, and agreeing on what 'done' means before I start.
Product · Prototyping · Agents · Design systems8 min read
In my agent rig, prompts, routes, skills and even fine-tuned models all start in shadow. Promotion is a separate, evidence-backed step that a person takes. Here's the lifecycle, and why it matters more as the number of moving parts grows.
Agents · AI · Local LLMs · Delivery6 min read
A rock tumbler doesn't make a stone smooth in one pass. It uses coarse grit, then finer grit, then polish, and checks between stages. That's how I build agent loops in Starship: bounded retries, deterministic gates, and lessons that are only allowed to hurt once.
Agents · AI · Architecture · Delivery7 min read
Starship runs its coding and planning agents on a small fleet of Apple Silicon Macs I own. Here is when local models beat the cloud, what it cost me in operational lessons, and where I still reach for a hosted model.
AI · Agents · Architecture · Local LLMs6 min read
How Starship's coding agents go from a planned task to a merged pull request without a human driving each step, and the gates, retries and postmortems that make that safe to leave running.
AI · Agents · Architecture · Delivery6 min read
A coding agent is only as good as what it's handed. Here is how Starship curates its skill library, enforces standards, and keeps the context it feeds models grounded and current, including where that loop was still open.
AI · Agents · Architecture · Local LLMs6 min read