Build logs from a personal agentic software factory.https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/enhttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/two-reviewers-one-exploit-two-real-bugs/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/two-reviewers-one-exploit-two-real-bugs/Two AI reviewers, independently, with real build and openssl access, found a bypassable revocation path and a spoofable certificate identity field in device-CA code. Both were confirmed with a live exploit, before and after the fix.Fri, 28 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTagentic-sdlc-patternshttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/shipping-with-a-watch-not-a-verdict/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/shipping-with-a-watch-not-a-verdict/Five doubt cycles on one small registry guard, and the finding rate never reached zero. What actually caught the headline bugs was mutation testing and fresh-context review, self-inspection caught none of them.Thu, 27 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTagentic-sdlc-patternshttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/it-wasnt-a-matched-cast-comparison/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/it-wasnt-a-matched-cast-comparison/A live-model coordination comparison looked decisive: peer-delegation succeeding, central-orchestrator starving the colony. An independent review asked whether it was actually a fair fight. It wasn't.Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTagentic-sdlc-patternshttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/doubt-before-the-code-exists/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/doubt-before-the-code-exists/Adversarial review, applied at intent-declaration time instead of code-review time, caught real defects before a single commit existed to review, proving the doctrine is a decision-making technique, not just a code technique.Tue, 25 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTagentic-sdlc-patternshttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/the-fixes-that-held-changed-a-rule/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/the-fixes-that-held-changed-a-rule/Three adversarial review rounds on the same new codebase, and the diagnostic that separated a durable fix from a fragile one: did it change a rule, or just a line?Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTagentic-sdlc-patternshttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/no-model-reviews-its-own-homework/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/no-model-reviews-its-own-homework/Four documented review cycles, one recurring shape: a fix, left unreviewed by a second perspective, quietly introduces the next bug. The sentence the factory arrived at after proving it the hard way, four times.Sun, 23 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTagentic-sdlc-patternshttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/human-confirmed-grew-up/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/human-confirmed-grew-up/A human-approval field starts life as one gameable boolean. It becomes real governance when it grows a return path that shows the actual diff before applying anything, and first-class records for the runs that never came back at all.Sat, 22 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTgovernance-without-killing-the-joyhttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/teach-the-engine-to-decline/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/teach-the-engine-to-decline/Pass/fail is not enough vocabulary for an autonomous engine. A third outcome, declined, lets a caller escalate automatically through a whole chain of engines and still refuse cloud egress the instant no human is there to consent to it.Fri, 21 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTagentic-sdlc-patternshttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/two-gates-two-claims/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/two-gates-two-claims/V1 and go-live sound like two names for the same milestone. Treating them as one claim would have let a comprehensive test suite stand in for real-world proof, so the gates were deliberately split, and the first honest evidence for the second one arrived not yet met.Thu, 20 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTgovernance-without-killing-the-joyhttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/the-smoke-test-that-missed-the-task/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/the-smoke-test-that-missed-the-task/Four live runs of a deliberately trivial bugfix proved every mechanism in the pipeline worked exactly as designed. The bug still didn't get fixed. Recording that as one win and three risks, instead of a pass, is what kept the follow-up work honest.Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTgovernance-without-killing-the-joyhttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/verifying-the-wrong-universe/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/verifying-the-wrong-universe/Worktree isolation was correct. Post-task verification was correct. Composed together with no validation at the seam, a relative path silently pointed the verify step at the wrong directory, and produced a confident, meaningless result.Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTagentic-sdlc-patternshttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/the-rework-path-that-never-existed/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/the-rework-path-that-never-existed/The CLI's own error message told you to block a failed task for rework. That advice was an illegal state transition every time it printed, since the day the vocabulary was written, and nobody noticed until a review actually read the transition table.Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTgremlins-at-workhttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/build-the-fake-project-first/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/build-the-fake-project-first/Every remaining feature got proven against a checked-in, disposable demo project before touching anything real, until an ARB review found the demo's own success report could go green without ever actually checking the thing it claimed to prove.Sun, 16 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTagentic-sdlc-patternshttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/the-lego-block-contract/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/the-lego-block-contract/A tool is only genuinely modular if it's fully useful with zero of its integration partners present. The way to prove that instead of asserting it: a runner-agnostic contract plus a checked-in reference implementation that needs none of them.Sat, 15 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTfrom-prompt-to-platformhttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/when-exit-0-lies/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/when-exit-0-lies/A dispatcher trusted exit code alone to mean success, until a neighboring lab's unrelated refactor made exit 0 and 'nothing happened, on purpose' the same integer. The bug was caught before it ever reached a real build.Fri, 14 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTgovernance-without-killing-the-joyhttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/giving-the-factory-a-spine-in-a-day/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/giving-the-factory-a-spine-in-a-day/A session tracker became a task-DAG orchestrator by adding optional fields and one new self-transition event to what already existed, instead of forking a second system, proven the same day against a real 12-task build.Thu, 13 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTbuilding-the-agentic-factoryhttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/status-is-derived-never-stored/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/status-is-derived-never-stored/The original design had a status field you edited. The rewrite has no status field at all, just an append-only event log and a pure function that replays it. Concurrency safety and text-editor repair both fall out for free.Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTagentic-sdlc-patternshttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/the-project-that-shipped-nothing-twice/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/the-project-that-shipped-nothing-twice/Twenty-five days of beautiful documentation, zero source files, and a sibling lab that had quietly done the exact same thing. The fix wasn't more planning. It was an honest demotion.Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTbuilding-the-agentic-factoryhttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/one-human-sentence-two-agents-two-repos/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/one-human-sentence-two-agents-two-repos/A converged run still had to be closed out across two repositories. The human's entire contribution was one approval sentence in chat. Everything after it was two agents in two repos completing a live handshake, neither one ever committing in the other's tree.Mon, 10 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTagentic-sdlc-patternshttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/two-labs-no-cloud-one-fix/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/two-labs-no-cloud-one-fix/A cross-repo path-conflation fix turned a harness that only worked on itself into one that could fix a genuinely foreign repository. The same day, a sibling lab's fourth attempt at a real bug closed, entirely through local models.Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTlocal-llm-lab-noteshttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/make-the-reviewer-quote-its-evidence/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/make-the-reviewer-quote-its-evidence/The same trust shift that fixed diff generation fixed the review panel too: a second-pass verifier that must quote an exact line from the diff, mechanically checked, not trusted on its word.Sat, 08 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTlocal-llm-lab-noteshttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/a-review-panel-on-one-model-is-one-reviewer-in-four-hats/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/a-review-panel-on-one-model-is-one-reviewer-in-four-hats/A hardware ceiling forced a four-persona review panel onto one resident model. Measuring it honestly, against both a bugs-seeded fixture and a genuinely clean one, found a real instruction-following ceiling the panel couldn't tighten past.Fri, 07 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTlocal-llm-lab-noteshttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/the-bug-behind-the-bug/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/the-bug-behind-the-bug/Fixing the diff-authoring problem let a patch survive for the first time in the workflow's history, and immediately tripped a second bug that had been invisible since day one.Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTlocal-llm-lab-noteshttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/stop-teaching-the-model-diff-syntax/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/stop-teaching-the-model-diff-syntax/After three eliminated hypotheses, the fix wasn't a better prompt. It was removing the requirement that the model author diff syntax at all, and the first live attempt afterward finally produced a clean-applying patch.Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTlocal-llm-lab-noteshttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/falsify-your-favorite-hypothesis-first/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/falsify-your-favorite-hypothesis-first/Every plausible explanation for the malformed-diff pattern got tested against stored evidence instead of assumed, and every one of them was insufficient or flatly wrong, before the real cause finally cleared.Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTlocal-llm-lab-noteshttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/the-model-that-couldnt-write-a-patch/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/the-model-that-couldnt-write-a-patch/A local model can diagnose a bug correctly and still fail to ship the fix. Four live runs, two models, two scenarios, three genuinely different ways of getting the diff syntax wrong.Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTlocal-llm-lab-noteshttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/mission-command-for-agent-fleets/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/mission-command-for-agent-fleets/Every capability gain in this factory routed more decisions through the same single human. The design response borrows doctrine older than software: mission command, where standing intent lets agents act without asking, and the human's attention becomes the resource the whole system is scheduled around.Sun, 02 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTPersonal Operating Systemhttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/the-docs-said-no-code-yet/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/the-docs-said-no-code-yet/A platform-wide integration review found two labs whose READMEs still read 'scaffolded' or 'initial setup in progress' over roughly 2.8k and 1.4k lines of real code apiece. Nobody wrote a false sentence. The docs were just true once, and the code moved on without them -- so the fix was a bounded agent role, not a cleanup sprint.Sat, 01 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTgremlins-at-workhttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/dont-write-intent-for-code-that-already-exists/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/dont-write-intent-for-code-that-already-exists/Intent-assurance-lab's first real trial needed a genuinely unstarted task. The obvious candidate turned out to have live, uncommitted work already in progress on the exact feature -- and writing intent against it would have proven nothing except that hindsight writes clean specs.Fri, 31 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTagentic-sdlc-patternshttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/review-the-intent-not-the-diff/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/review-the-intent-not-the-diff/Agents produce code faster than one human can read diffs. Intent-assurance-lab's bet is to move the review unit up a level: a falsifiable statement of what a change should make true, plus the evidence, with line-by-line reading reserved for where that evidence is thin.Thu, 30 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTagentic-sdlc-patternshttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/a-lock-on-a-door-that-wasnt-there/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/a-lock-on-a-door-that-wasnt-there/The sandbox build's scariest bugs never crashed anything. A firewall rule filtering an interface that didn't exist, an adverse test that passed against a VM that wasn't there, a fix that recurred one layer up. Three containment claims, all confident, all testing nothing.Sat, 18 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTbuilding-the-agentic-factoryhttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/a-blocked-banner-as-an-api-between-two-labs/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/a-blocked-banner-as-an-api-between-two-labs/Three real runs failed on the same trivial bug, and every new session wanted to try again. The fix wasn't a retry. It was a sentence in the backlog: do not pull on this thread again from this side, and here is exactly what reopens it.Sat, 18 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTagentic-sdlc-patternshttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/cloud-egress-is-a-runtime-property/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/cloud-egress-is-a-runtime-property/The same model is reachable three ways from my machine, and each way has a different answer to whether my task's content leaves the building. The gateway stopped asking which vendor an engine belongs to and started asking how it runs.Sat, 18 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTgovernance-without-killing-the-joyhttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/honest-evals-as-culture/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/honest-evals-as-culture/My eval log is a list of recorded disappointments: a fix that didn't move the number, a review panel wrongly flagging clean code three times out of four. Writing those down felt like self-sabotage. It's the only reason the eventual win means anything.Sat, 18 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTgovernance-without-killing-the-joyhttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/one-blind-spot-found-twice/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/one-blind-spot-found-twice/In two weeks across four labs, a second AI reviewer caught a fabricated example, rescoped a whole system, confirmed the same bug twice independently, and flagged a security check testing the wrong path. One thesis, five exhibits: independence is what you're paying for.Sat, 18 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTagentic-sdlc-patternshttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/shipping-through-the-gate-you-wrote-about/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/shipping-through-the-gate-you-wrote-about/Go-live day is when governance gets bypassed. This site's own launch was the test: the agent's safety check flagged its own launch plan RED, the flag was honoured even though it was a false positive, and a human ran the apply.Sat, 18 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTgovernance-without-killing-the-joyhttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/the-3b-model-writes-the-brief/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/the-3b-model-writes-the-brief/The small local model keeps failing at the actual work, so the obvious conclusion is that it's useless. The gateway found the job it's genuinely good at: writing the structured brief a frontier model executes. The intern doesn't do the surgery. The intern preps the theatre.Sat, 18 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTlocal-llm-lab-noteshttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/the-drift-checker-that-couldnt-see-its-own-drift/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/the-drift-checker-that-couldnt-see-its-own-drift/The mirror-staleness detector ran on schedule and reported current. It was comparing one field: the latest date heading. Nine fresh entries and one stale mirror looked identical to it. The most dangerous checker is the one that runs fine and compares too little.Sat, 18 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTgremlins-at-workhttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/the-exception-that-sat-in-a-drawer/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/the-exception-that-sat-in-a-drawer/Two governance proposals were drafted, never sent, and reviewed three days later. In those three days the docs they cited had been restructured and the systems they assumed had moved. Reviewing an exception is not re-reading its words.Sat, 18 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTgovernance-without-killing-the-joyhttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/the-indexer-nobody-called/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/the-indexer-nobody-called/The symbol indexer was built in week one. It had tests, structure, and a job. Weeks later, wiring up the graph layer, I found the truth in passing: no production code had ever called it. The repo map had been silently empty on every real run.Sat, 18 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTlocal-llm-lab-noteshttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/the-routing-policy-finally-learned-something/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/the-routing-policy-finally-learned-something/Every rule in the routing policy started life as a guess with good posture. One rule carried a counter that forced a re-check after five real runs. The counter fired, the evidence came back, and the rule changed in the most boring way possible: not at all.Sat, 18 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTgovernance-without-killing-the-joyhttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/two-sessions-claimed-run-0023/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/two-sessions-claimed-run-0023/Two agent sessions closed out in parallel, both read the same last id, both wrote RUN-0023. Then it happened again with RUN-0026. Sequential ids in a multi-writer log are a collision generator by design, and the ledger sitting next door proves the alternative.Sat, 18 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTagentic-sdlc-patternshttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/who-designed-the-lock/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/who-designed-the-lock/Two labs asked to trust cryptography that didn't exist yet, in the same week. Both times the answer was the same: the control's owner designs the lock, shape-checking is not signing, and a decision to accept a design is not the deliverable.Sat, 18 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTgovernance-without-killing-the-joyhttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/a-fresh-model-read-my-backlog-and-found-a-lie/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/a-fresh-model-read-my-backlog-and-found-a-lie/My next-actions file said HIGHEST PRIORITY in capital letters, and it was pointing at work that was already finished. I couldn't see it from inside. A fresh-context model, told to trust nothing and verify the repo first, could.Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTpersonal-operating-systemhttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/five-of-six-model-names-didnt-exist/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/five-of-six-model-names-didnt-exist/The first real overnight machine-setup run failed on model names that looked completely plausible and were completely invented. The registry had tracked their checksums as unverified for weeks. Nobody had ever checked the names.Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTlocal-llm-lab-noteshttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/the-engines-now-edit-a-photocopy/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/the-engines-now-edit-a-photocopy/Three AI engines are allowed to edit my repositories. As of this week they edit a git worktree copy instead, and the human gate reviews one diff and chooses to apply it. The design work was the edges: escalations, conflicts, and the runs that must not be isolated.Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTgovernance-without-killing-the-joyhttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/the-gateway-reviews-its-own-changesets/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/the-gateway-reviews-its-own-changesets/A refactor of the cloud-egress gate looked tidy and passed every test. The pre-commit review board caught the one real regression: the gate had quietly learned to fail open. The reviewer was the same model that wrote the bug.Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTfrom-prompt-to-platformhttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/the-typo-that-meant-no-restrictions/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/the-typo-that-meant-no-restrictions/A privacy gate passed every test I gave it, then routed a machine-local task toward the cloud over a single underscore. The bug was not the typo. The bug was what the gate did when it met a word it didn't know.Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTgovernance-without-killing-the-joyhttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/how-hekton-built-its-own-public-site/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/how-hekton-built-its-own-public-site/The tempting shortcut was to treat the marketing site as low-stakes and skip the usual rigor. Instead it went through the same classification, governance, and human-apply gate as everything else the factory builds, and that turned out to matter.Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTbuilding-the-agentic-factoryhttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/the-architecture-map-caught-itself-lying/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/the-architecture-map-caught-itself-lying/A tool that models your whole system will eventually model itself. The day it did, it found a stale flag on its own repo, a bug that had been sleeping for months, and a promotion claim that was one missing file from being false.Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTtiny-enterprise-architecturehttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/the-day-two-agents-drafted-the-same-six-posts/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/the-day-two-agents-drafted-the-same-six-posts/Two agent sessions independently drafted the same wave of six blog posts at once. Nobody planned that. The fix was not to prevent it, it was to make it survivable.Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTagentic-sdlc-patternshttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/the-field-journals-first-interactive-island/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/the-field-journals-first-interactive-island/Adding one interactive component to a static site is exactly the kind of change that tends to sprawl. This one went through an ARB review and a security pass before merging, and then became a shared pattern instead of a one-off.Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTgovernance-without-killing-the-joyhttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/the-first-thing-the-factory-was-allowed-to-delete/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/the-first-thing-the-factory-was-allowed-to-delete/Every automation in this factory was additive or read-only, on purpose, until the night it needed to clean up its own branches. The engineering was the easy part. The hard part was deciding what it was allowed to touch.Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTgovernance-without-killing-the-joyhttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/the-second-control-plane/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/the-second-control-plane/Where things live is not the same question as what is allowed to leave. A boundary rule that only knows the first question is half a governance model.Wed, 01 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTmind-palace-diarieshttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/watching-the-watcher/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/watching-the-watcher/A silent guard that stops running looks identical to a guard with nothing to report. The fix is not a second checker. It is a log the first guard keeps of itself.Wed, 01 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTmind-palace-diarieshttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/the-linter-caught-me/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/the-linter-caught-me/A rule kept in your head, or even in a document, is a rule you will break. If a rule is worth having, it is worth a checker, and the first thing mine caught was me.Mon, 29 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTmind-palace-diarieshttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/the-unskippable-check/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/the-unskippable-check/A guard in your critical path is a guard you will learn to skip. Move the check out of band, read-only and silent until it fails, and there is nothing left to route around.Mon, 29 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTmind-palace-diarieshttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/the-mirror-that-rotted/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/the-mirror-that-rotted/A curated copy is still a copy, and copies drift. A second brain should link to its projects, not photocopy them, and copy in only the one thing it actually learns from.Sun, 28 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTmind-palace-diarieshttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/building-the-factory-while-standing-inside-it/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/building-the-factory-while-standing-inside-it/I used Hekton to build Hekton. Over one weekend the scaffolding workflow built its own children, and the trail it left was the real product.Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTbuilding-the-agentic-factoryhttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/the-blog-factory-eats-its-own-dog-food/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/the-blog-factory-eats-its-own-dog-food/This blog is credible because it can show the machinery that made it: a team of bounded writing gremlins, and a gate that keeps all of them away from the publish button.Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTfrom-prompt-to-platformhttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/governance-as-code-but-for-my-own-sanity/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/governance-as-code-but-for-my-own-sanity/A few YAML files and a risk classifier do real governance work: they make an agent stop before anything irreversible, and turn blocked into a respected verdict.Sat, 20 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTgovernance-without-killing-the-joyhttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/labs-gremlins-and-other-bad-ideas-that-somehow-work/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/labs-gremlins-and-other-bad-ideas-that-somehow-work/Calling your automation a gremlin sounds unserious. It survives review because the name is a handle and the contract is the architecture.Fri, 19 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTgremlins-at-workhttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/the-hekton-control-plane/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/the-hekton-control-plane/Context is infrastructure. The control plane is the boundary that decides what travels and what never leaves the machine, not the folder it sits in.Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTmind-palace-diarieshttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/the-tiny-software-department-in-my-laptop/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/the-tiny-software-department-in-my-laptop/The fantasy is that AI does the work. The reality is a small department of named roles, each with one job and a stop condition.Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTbuilding-the-agentic-factoryhttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/backlog-management-for-one-human-and-several-artificial-interns/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/backlog-management-for-one-human-and-several-artificial-interns/Every backlog tool I tried, I eventually stopped opening. The thing that stuck was a daily read-only brief that comes to me and never touches my task list.Mon, 15 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTpersonal-operating-systemhttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/local-llms-and-the-offline-factory/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/local-llms-and-the-offline-factory/The question stopped being can this Mac run a model, and became can the factory decide which worker does which job, with evidence.Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTlocal-llm-lab-noteshttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/meet-quartergremlin/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/meet-quartergremlin/A scaffolding agent with a silly name and a deadly serious stop condition. Quartergremlin works because it knows exactly where to quit.Thu, 11 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTgremlins-at-workhttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/clean-commits-in-a-multi-agent-world/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/clean-commits-in-a-multi-agent-world/The morning a commit ate my commit. Git stopped being a filing cabinet and became the audit trail, the handoff boundary, and the review checkpoint.Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTgovernance-without-killing-the-joyhttps://hekton.theagentictekton.com/from-vibe-coding-to-agentic-engineering/https://hekton.theagentictekton.com/from-vibe-coding-to-agentic-engineering/Vibe coding works until you try to trust it twice. The fix was not a better prompt. It was an operating model.Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTbuilding-the-agentic-factory