The ask, once
Bring your documents.
There is nothing to install, and it is not a trial. Send the requirements documents you already have: the ones written for people, in Word, with a table of contents and a roadmap in them. It comes back as a plan with phases, work units, an architecture drawing per phase, a cost built from the same units, issues on your own board, and a list of the questions it would not answer on its own.
It costs you a week of attention. That is the real price of the pilot, and it is the one nobody quotes.
The pilot
Fixed fee. One requirements document to a deployed build, on our infrastructure, with the training and the documentation. Credited in full against year one.
The build is StellarView ALPHA 1. Soft launch, 1 September 2026.
Then the licence, a year
A platform licence, not per seat, because the value does not scale with how many people log in. It scales with how many systems it plans and builds.
The pilot is the one to take. The licence is printed here so this page can be forwarded to whoever has to budget for it.
Send the document →Or write to joeshawfield@practicai.org with the document attached.
Or run it yourself first
The same image we install for a pilot, on your own machine, against your own repository. No call, and nothing to cancel. You hold the keys and you can delete the container.
Your link will arrive shortly.
A person issues it rather than a script, so it is minutes rather than instant. It goes to the address you gave. Here is the rest of it, so none of it is a surprise.
- The link. One file, and it is the same image we install for a pilot.
- Two commands.
docker compose up, thenhttp://localhost:3456. It starts without keys and tells you on the first screen which ones are missing, so you can look around before committing anything. - Your keys. A GitHub token and a Claude API key. You hold the Claude key and pay Anthropic directly, so there is no markup and you watch the spend as it happens. Seven more are optional and each one turns something on. Get the Claude key at console.anthropic.com.
- Point it at something you already have. Not a sample project. A repository with history and opinions in it, which is the only way to find out whether this reads code the way you do.
Four words first
Nothing else on the first screen makes sense without these.
- Gap A question the plan cannot answer on its own
- Something the work needs decided that the document did not say, listed rather than guessed at.
- Galaxy Repository or project
- A repository with its configuration, credentials, analysis state and history, held as one thing.
- Big Bang Where an epic is built
- The screen that turns a document or a description into phases, work units, gaps and an architecture diagram per phase.
- Epic A body of work, broken down
- A feature large enough to need decomposing into phases and work units before anyone writes code.
- Slingshot The app on your machine that opens StellarView
- The client: the desktop app for Mac and Windows and the command-line kit. It finds a StellarView, starts one here in Docker, opens the channel to one in your account, and shows the cockpit. Slingshot is what runs on your machine; StellarView is what it opens. Versioned on its own, because one Slingshot works against many releases.
- Sling Send a StellarView somewhere
- A verb first: to sling is to send a StellarView somewhere, onto this machine in Docker, into your own AWS account, or off to the cloud as a Replicant with a job to do. What has been slung and is answering is a sling: a container here, an instance there, an ECS task. Slingshot is what does the slinging, and it opens any sling into the same cockpit; only the channel differs. A Ghost and a Replicant are kinds of sling.
- Gate A check that refuses, rather than warns
- A named assertion that stops the work when it fails and says what it measured. A gate that cannot fail is worse than no gate, because it reports success while inspecting nothing.
- All the way Build, deploy, fleet, document
- The four things a product has to do to survive its own creation, run as one motion rather than four handovers.
- Wormhole Reaching a machine without opening it
- The practice, not the pipe. Every machine we run has no inbound rules, no SSH key and no password, and is reached only over SSM - port forwarding for a cockpit, Run Command for a build, Session Manager to preserve a machine before destroying it. Egress is outbound through a NAT. Credentials come from the customer's own account, never ours.
The rest of the vocabulary, when you want it.
Or watch instead
15 clips, 10:57 in total, thirty to forty-five seconds each.
- Galaxy Repository or project
- Ring Layer of the architecture, drawn
- Big Bang Where an epic is built
- Epic A body of work, broken down
- Work Unit A single implementable task
- Gap A question the plan cannot answer on its own
All 15, or the full films if you would rather see a whole delivery.
Nothing arrived? Write to joeshawfield@practicai.org.
Before that
Nothing on this page needs deciding today. There are three things to do first and none of them cost anything.
- Learn the 15 words. 10:57, in clips of thirty to forty-five seconds.
- Read the case in order. Six articles, each with a film and each with a paragraph naming what it does not prove.
- Read the Journal. It is the work in progress, with the mistakes left in.