The method
The shipping floor for AI‑native engineering teams.
Seven named states, event-driven dispatch off your tracker, versioned specialists that fire on a transition, not a clock. Repo, tracker, policy, knowledge, and evidence — one workspace, one accountable loop. Not a product we sell — the operating methodology we run our own company on, written into a book and open on GitHub.
Ship ships Ship
We run our own delivery on the method this page describes.
The engine runs its own delivery loop — tickets, planning, PRs, merges — through the same workspace this page describes. The numbers below come straight from that repository.
1,214
Engine commits since April
288k
Lines of code
385
Commits, last 30 days
50
PRs merged, last 30 days
Cadence · measured from our own delivery
Cadence as a load‑bearing metric, not a bumper sticker.
The numbers an SRE‑literate buyer actually reads — measured from the engine shipping its own changes through this loop. Deployment frequency and lead time are real and verifiable; we don't publish change‑fail or recovery numbers we can't yet measure cleanly. A missing number beats a flattering one.
17
PRs shipped, last 24h
Elite10 min
Median lead time, open → merge
Elite85%
PRs merged under an hour
Live1
PRs in flight right now
LiveDeployment frequency and PRs‑in‑flight read live from the workspace; lead‑time figures are the median over the last 40 merged pull requests on ElMundiUA/ship. Pulled, not rendered — so the promise behind each number is one you can re‑run.
What the method is
A loop with named owners, fenced agents, and a paper trail.
Six properties that compose into one operating model. None of them are features in isolation; together they're what makes the loop legible to a CTO at a glance.
The loop
Seven named states from ticket to merged PR
Backlog → Planning → Executing → Reviewing → Awaiting input → Blocked → Closed, connected by a Default flow. Every ticket is in exactly one. A new hire reads the board on day one.
Named owners
Specialists, not roles in spirit
Planning bundle, Developer, Validation bundle, Reviewer, DevOps, Designer, Clarification specialist. Each stage names which agent acts and which artifact it produces.
Routines
Routines that fire on a transition, not a clock
Delivery dispatches when a ticket's state changes — event-driven, off your tracker. A few jobs stay time-scheduled (daily digest, retro, nightly knowledge); self-heal was retired once the contract got boring enough not to need it.
Evidence
Audit trail as a side-effect, not a project
Every decision, retrieval, and outcome captured as an artifact. The Audit log filters by surface and time. Compliance is grep, not a meeting.
Knowledge
Curated facts the agents actually read
Per-workspace buckets backed by the memory layer. Import sources — repos, web pages, file upload, Notion/Confluence — refresh on a schedule. Nothing publishes silently; every fact passes through review.
Owner-first
Humans stay accountable
Clarifications and approvals are worked through your own agent and the /approve page — no mailbox to babysit. Resolve, approve, or dismiss; every disposition is logged. The merge is yours.
The surfaces, in order
Drive from your agent. Work the decisions. Walk the pipeline.
Your own agent over MCP is the front door; the console is the thin trust surface behind it. A few views carry the rest of the day — the same ones, in the same order, every morning.
Workspace home
Ask your agent what's in flight
No dashboard to monitor. Ask your own agent over MCP and it reads back the priorities feed: what's active, what's waiting on you, the last thing that shipped. If the answer is quiet, the system is quietly doing nothing — that's a finding, not a feature.
Read the docsDecisions
Approvals, not a mailbox to drain
Only items that need a human: clarifications, approvals, blockers. Your agent surfaces them and you sign off in the same breath — or open the web /approve page for the deliberate ones. Every disposition is logged. Nothing to babysit.
Read the docsProcess · SDLC
The seven-stage pipeline with named specialists
One ticket walks all seven states in order. A transition dispatches the one routine for that stage — planning bundle, implementation, review. You can stand a new hire in front of the board on day one and they can read it.
Read the docsAudit
Every action, one query away
Every workspace, member, integration, pipeline, repo, clarification, invite, and agent action — captured. Query it with audit_search from your agent or the API, filtered by actor, action, and time. If a question can be answered by grep, it is answered here.
Read the docsThe specialists
Named agents. Versioned roles. Swappable executors.
A specialist is a role definition — "developer", "code reviewer", "validation bundle" — pinned to a stage. The executor (Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, Copilot) plugs in underneath. Swap executors tomorrow and the routine, the specialist, and the process stay unchanged. That separation is the whole method.
Pipeline owners
Platform
Intake / clarify
How our factory runs it
Three pieces of internal machinery. None of them for sale.
Ship
The methodology this whole page describes, and the reference implementation that runs it. Not sold standalone — retainer and fix-sprint clients get a workspace as part of the engagement, a deliverable component rather than a SKU.
Reference implementation ↗Lighthouse
The memory layer: canonical docs indexed for retrieval, served over MCP with citations. Never a tier, never hosted for sale — open source, read the implementation, run it on your own corpus.
Reference implementation ↗Buzz
Internal only: the distribution engine that turns audit findings and engagement scars into the field notes and posts you're reading now. No waitlist, no page — its output is the proof.
See what it produces →Keep going
Docs
Every surface, every flag
Orientation, Setup, Process, Inbox, Knowledge, Audit. The full reference.
Open
Quickstart
The reference implementation, step by step
Eight operator steps. ~20 minutes start to finish.
Open
Case study
ElMundi UA
5,000 years of history, shipped by the loop this page describes.
Open
Not sold standalone
We won’t sell you the method. We’ll run it on your pipeline.
Retainer and fix-sprint engagements ship a Ship workspace as part of the work. For everyone else: read the reference implementation, read the book, or start with an audit.