Building in the open

The first part shipped last week. An uploader — file in, validated file out, the boundary cases handled, the whole thing pinned to a version and signed. Nothing that would impress anyone at a conference. I watched an agent reach for it and not rewrite it, and I sat there longer than I'd admit.

That's the work now. Not a demo. A registry, and the dull, exacting question underneath it: what must be true about a piece of software before an agent — and the human reviewing that agent — agrees to reuse it instead of building its own slightly-wrong version?

So I'm writing the contract. What a part has to satisfy to earn a place. Inputs and outputs that don't lie. A test suite that actually proves the claim. Provenance you can follow back to a person. A version that means something. It reads less like product design and more like writing a building code — the kind nobody notices until a wall holds.

This is the part of the job I quietly love. In Prague we have buildings that have stood six hundred years because someone got the foundation honest. You don't see the foundation. You see that the thing is still standing.

I'm building it in the open from here. The registry, the conformance checks, the first dozen parts — out where people can poke at them, break them, tell me the contract is wrong. I'd rather hear that now than ship a standard nobody trusts.

If you build with agents and you're tired of watching them regenerate the same flawed component every Tuesday, come look. Argue with me. The load-bearing layer only matters if other people are willing to stand on it.