Notes from the build
Everything here comes out of this project’s own records rather than from opinion. Where a post describes a defect, that defect was real, it was found on a stated date, and the fix is in the repository.
Why the crew works in its own checkout
Running several agents in the architect’s working tree is fine until it isn’t. The fix was a worktree each — and the interesting part was what that broke.
Forty green tests, nine killed mutants, and three ways past the gate
A new coverage gate passed its own tests, survived mutation testing, and was defeated three times in ten minutes by someone actively trying to walk through it.
The recurring defect of this codebase is a check that cannot fail
Five instances found in a single day, in five different subsystems, by five different routes. The pattern was not carelessness — every one of them was written by someone trying to be careful.
The MVP ships one engine, and says so
Ephesus is designed around an engine-agnostic adapter seam. It ships with exactly one engine wired — and the decision record exists mostly to stop that being misread in both directions.
A green suite over 1,406 lines nothing could reach
A milestone shipped a subsystem that was fully implemented, fully tested, and never once called by the application. Every test passed. The feature did not exist.
A research department that must cite a commit or die
The Stoa reads other people’s repositories and reports what it finds. The rule that makes it trustworthy also caught it citing a commit that existed in no repository at all.
A project whose primary mission is its own improvement
The Gymnasium lets the company propose changes to itself. Everything interesting about it is in the constraints — a falsifiable metric before any human reads it, and a ledger that keeps the rejections.