Services

Everything below is work this shop already does for itself. The work ledger is the evidence — including the things that were retired or never shipped, which is the part most portfolios leave out.

The method is one setup, pointed at different problems: agent loops do the building, and mechanical gates decide what they are allowed to land. The reasoning is in Mechanical enforcement over behavioural rules.

Agent-run engineering

Building and operating systems where the loop does the work and the constraints are structural rather than advisory. In practice that means the unglamorous layer — filesystems, hooks, mount points, CI gates — because that is where an agent’s actual permissions live, not in the prompt.

This site is a working sample. Its own facts are rendered from a data file and a gate fails the build if a hand-typed count or version re-enters the content, so a page cannot quietly disagree with the product it documents. The write-up is The site that lints its own honesty.

Guardrails for AI development environments

Reviewing and hardening what your agents are actually permitted to do — config hygiene, instruction files, hooks, and the gap between the governance document and the enforced rule. rigscore is the tool that grew out of this, and it has a manual on this site.

The case for the work is on the work ledger: an agent that ran here shipped with a written boundary listing five read-only endpoints and, by the time it was archived, reached fifty-two — fifteen of them accepting writes. Nobody approved the expansion. The document meant to constrain it had been updated to describe the drift instead. A rule nothing enforces is a preference.

Data products

Pipelines and dashboards over public data, built so a gap reads as a gap. Quiet Corners scores rural US counties from Census and USDA sources; a county missing an input is scored over the inputs it has, with the remaining weights renormalised, so a hole cannot quietly flatter a score. The coverage panel reports what was actually scored, read from the export rather than asserted by the page.

That property is the deliverable. A number on a dashboard should be traceable to a source or absent — never defaulted into looking like a measurement.

Internal operations systems

Systems of record for how an organisation actually runs. driftless is the one running this business — portfolio, program and project management where percent complete is computed rather than typed, baselines are additive, and generated reports regenerate to identical bytes from an explicit as-of date. The long-form account is Headless Project Management.

Tooling

Single-purpose libraries and CLIs get carved out of the above when a problem turns out to be general — media encoding, geospatial, colour, redaction. The work ledger lists each one and whether it reached real use.

How engagements work

Every engagement is scoped individually against the problem, because the shape of the work varies more than any rate card could absorb. No pricing is published here; scope comes first, and a number that precedes the scope is a guess wearing a decimal point.

There is no checkout on this site and nothing to buy from a page. Work starts with a conversation — get in touch.