Showcase: one night of governed design

On the night of 4 October 2026, between 00:56 and 04:30 UTC, an operator, a design session, an orchestrator session and its sub-agents took a run of design decisions and shipped several product sites. Read afterwards, almost every piece of that work was a case under a protocol of the kind engineering protocols declare: a question became a decision only once it was recorded, a change merged only after its checks passed on the revision being merged, a red check was repaired before anything else moved, and a site was published only from a merged, verified commit.

The work falls into four protocols, named the way engineering protocols name them:

Protocol	What a case of it is
design.decision/1	A question taken to a recorded decision: analysis, the operator's decision, a draft, the record.
software.change/1	A change implemented, proven on the current revision by its checks, reviewed and merged.
ci.repair/1	A failing check investigated and repaired, interrupting whatever the session was doing.
release.source/1	A merged commit published, and the published result verified against that commit.

Engineering protocols now ship software.change/1; the other three are named here for what the night shows and are not shipped protocols. See Protocols for what is shipped.

The night in numbers

Decisions

13

ADRs 0077–0087 and two epics

Decision → draft

53s

median, relay plus drafting

Question → decision

5m 36s

median, analysis plus reading

Pull requests merged

9

median open → merged 10m 00s

Interruptions

36m 35s

ci.repair time in the two sessions

The full replay

The replay shows every lane, every case and every decision step on one timeline, with the composition the sessions implied.

Open the full replay →

Where the data comes from

The data is a hand-compiled session record: message and tool-call timestamps from the agent host's session record, and pull request opened and merged times. It is not the output of a shipped tool. The Metaharness session miner (decision record 0088) is meant to produce this record in future. Participants are named by role: the operator is human:operator, and the orchestrating session is the orchestrator session. The record itself is published beside the replay as data.json.