Field Notes

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.

Live
01

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.

v0.1.108 2026-04-30
02

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.

v0.1.108 2026-04-30
03

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.

v0.1.108 2026-04-30
04

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.

v0.1.108 2026-04-30
Drafting
  • 05The Substrate Pipeline
  • 06Free, BYOK, Hosted — the Honest Cost Story