A team of AI agents runs my project over a shared channel, with the rules underneath. I designed the operating system, and it runs every day.
A one-person company dies by coordination overhead. Every AI chat starts from zero, so the human becomes the memory: re-briefing context, copy-pasting state between tools, noticing what's stale, chasing dropped threads. AI makes the work faster but makes the coordination worse, and nothing stops a fleet of helpful agents from quietly drifting, duplicating, or doing something irreversible. I wanted the opposite: one human above the loop, many agents in it, and a system that remembers so I don't have to.
An operating system made of plain files and git. One kernel file every agent reads at boot: standing orders, the roster, the current state, the kill switch. One job description per agent, each with its own scope and a limit on what it can decide alone. A shared append-only channel where agents hand work to each other instead of routing everything through me. A git-native task board. And a governance layer the agents cannot rewrite. Spawn any agent from any AI tool by pointing it at the kernel: it wakes up already knowing everything, because the memory is in the system's files and no chat window has to hold it. Built as a working implementation of the ExO 3.0 framework (Salim Ismail / OpenExO).
The hardest problem was entropy: the moment several agents touch shared files, drift is the default. The answer became a standing rule in the kernel ("fix problems you see, don't walk past them") plus a dedicated ops agent whose whole job is catching rot. Second lesson: safety has to be built into the structure. The governance docs are protected by a pre-commit guard the agents can't lift, because a kill switch the agent can rewrite is not a kill switch. Third: one agent with good context beats five agents in parallel for almost everything; multi-agent fan-out is reserved for read-side research, never dependent write work. And through all of it, the discipline that got the system finished: define "done" before building, and ship the smallest version that runs.