Foundry · The Operating Guide
How to run a business on an operating system.
For founders who just got an OS installed — or instantiated the open-source template themselves. No AI background assumed. The operating rhythm is adapted to the company, the work, and the founder’s available attention.
What you actually have
Most companies use AI as a chatbot: blank window, blank context, generic output. You have something different — a repository that teaches the AI who you are. Five contract files do the teaching:
- CLAUDE.md — the doctrine. The company handbook, read automatically by every AI session.
- AGENTS.md — the same rules on one page, readable by any AI tool.
- SKILL.md — what to load before each kind of work, and when the AI should refuse.
- design.md — every color, font, and spacing value your site is allowed to use.
- taste.md — the judgment tokens can't capture: references, refusals, the polish pass.
Edit these files and every future AI session changes behavior. That's the whole trick — the configuration is the company knowledge, and it compounds.
Day 1 — one evening
- Install Claude Code (or use Cursor or Codex — the contract files cover them too).
- Open a terminal in your repo and just talk. Try: “What are the rules of this repo?” The agent recites your doctrine back — that's how you know the harness is live.
- Read your own CLAUDE.md. It's the best summary of how everything fits.
The weekly rhythm — the whole operation
| When | Command | What happens | Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monday | /weekly-content | Plans the week: one post, one distribution action, one ops task. Three items max — sized for founders with day jobs. | 10 min |
| Midweek | /blog-post | Drafts, polishes, gates, and build-verifies a piece of content. | 1–2 h |
| Friday | /weekly-review | Asks you three questions, closes the week, updates the business memory. | 15 min |
The Friday step is the one people skip and shouldn't. The plan is disposable; the review is the asset — it writes to docs/intelligence/, the memory that makes week 30 smarter than week 1. The operating discipline in one line: check memory first, update memory after.
The gates — why your output won't look AI-generated
Nothing publishes without passing:
- @claims-guard — blocks regulated claim language, uncited assertions, banned phrases, and AI-tone. A FAIL is final until a human rewrites. This is the agent that keeps you out of regulatory trouble and out of the “obviously a chatbot wrote this” zone.
- /ship — typecheck, build, claims, and SEO before any deploy. A human always presses the deploy button.
- The polish pass — seven manual checks in taste.md before any visual ships.
The standing rule: agents draft, gate, and commit; humans deploy, post, and send.
When the harness improves upstream
Your repo descends from agentic-business-os. When the upstream harness improves, you receive a pull request with a plain-language changelog. You read the diff — it's markdown, readable in the GitHub interface — and merge or decline per file. Nothing ever auto-merges, and your brand files are never touched. The full contract is one page: HARNESS.md. The principle it encodes: brand is yours, machinery is shared.
Where to get help
- The template and skill packs are MIT-licensed — community help via GitHub issues.
- Installed by the Foundry? You have a direct channel — use it.
- Considering an install? Apply here.