Building the construction crew who build bakeries

I've been enjoying my ICM builds and systems. They are living and breathing and battle-tested. Now I've hit the point where I want to scale and expand them more than I practically can.

The limiting factor? Me and my taste. My taste... well there's plenty of posts in here that will give you a pretty good indication of it. Human in the loop. Augment that human at every turn rather than cutting them out. My judgement where it matters. Guardrails and governance and stakes considered from the outset - as

@Gabriel Azoulay

put it, build the refusal and verification first and the rest will follow. (Yes, I've mangled it, it's not a quote, but the sentiment is there nonetheless).

And in the middle of all of this, I've had a few ideas that have come in together.

@Curtis Hays

has agents in his system who sort requirements and building within his system.

@Ari Evergreen

has been inspiring me to think about where model vs model loops could play a piece in this picture to actually move things further along with my taste still driving all of the outcomes.

And somehow this mashed up together into the following.

@Bas Rosario

taught us about how ICM was like baking a cake. And that moving from a workflow to a workspace was going from having a system that baked a cake to building a bakery.

I can bake cakes. I have not one but two working bakeries.

Now I need a construction crew. Not any construction crew - ones who know my bakeries and my taste and follow those to the letter. They don't suggest things that aren't compatible with my industrial grade ovens. They know what to do with my delicate equipment - nothing that is hand wash only is being shoved in the dishwasher by this crew! They understand that in my bakeries, my rules govern; and they honour and enforce that.

Enter a new workspace where tools are made and bakeries are built. If you want to see them, glimpses of what these look like are already present in the week 8 competition builds - Chalky PRD (now 01 Chalky) and Architectural Thinking Partner (now 02 ATP).

The first stage was wrapping them together in a workspace, hardening up what could be hardened with deterministic code and having a set of sub-agent passes pre-defined and wired in. Thanks to Fable, that was achieved remarkably quickly. We also put in my real systems and architectural decisions to hold true to. Those are about ~112 decisions deep.

Then the next step in the chain proved the chain itself. For 03 Quarter, I ran the workspace I had built. Got the PRD written by using Chalky. Got the build spec using ATP. Talked a few more details through with Opus that I needed that to be really clear upfront and added that into the handoff as an extra deliverable.

Then I handed that build spec to Fable. Broken into stages, each gated on my approval. I also handed it some hard won lessons about my taste that I'd had to vent to Fable the night before to communicate across.

Fable is running right now. Stage 5 of 8 for the build, then Stage 9 is the first test run of Quarter. So far, I have agreed with every call. It's all been built to my house style, my taste. Because Fable can see the hard yards that have already been done with 01 and 02.

So far we've used 3% of my Fable tokens for the week to get us halfway there. Yes, I know the big stages are still ahead of us, but I am watching my construction crew come to life and it's a beautiful thing.

The part that's the most me of this whole thing? It's been built to keep a full track record of what gates pass or fail in the work orders that Quarter produces. So it has a library of my taste so that the self-improvement loop keeps running and training the construction crew every time. Baked in from before its first run. Thought through.

Ari said that failure to plan isn't building, it's gambling with extra steps. I have hardened and invested in my planning, run the chain over and over, refined it and now it is paying dividends. And you had better believe that I am using Fable this week, while I can, to build me a construction crew that'll run just fine on Opus.

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Building the construction crew who build bakeries