Notes
Long-form pieces on what o8 is, why we built it, and how each piece works under the hood. Stamped against the build they describe so you can tell when one has gone stale.
The Engineering Brain
Cursor reads files. Augment indexes a codebase. The Engineering Brain is the substrate underneath both — a queryable map of how your project actually works.
Orchestrator and Workhorse
Claude orchestrates. Codex builds. Humans review. o8 is the multi-harness control plane — the layer above the agent IDEs, coordinating across them.
Governance as a Feature
Approvals, audit, and the orchestrator-as-trust-layer are not bolted on. They are the thing that makes autonomy comfortable enough to give an agent the keys.
MCP is the Platform
o8 ships an MCP server first, an IDE second. Any agent that speaks MCP can drive an o8 session through the same governance layer.
Socket Truth
A local-first app is a web server on your machine, and every header a browser sends is forgeable. o8 trusts the one thing the client can't set — the address on the other end of the socket.
The Escalation Ladder
When an agent's merge fails, most tools retry forever or stall. o8 routes every failed merge down a fixed five-layer ladder — cheap automatic recovery at the bottom, a human at the top — with a hard cost ceiling.
Two Reviewers, One Blind
Most auto-review is one model rubber-stamping a diff. o8 classifies risk by what the diff touches and routes the dangerous ones to a second reviewer that never sees the first verdict.
- 08The Substrate Pipeline
- 09Free, BYOK, Hosted — the Honest Cost Story