What began as a remote-terminal trick, a phone reaching a laptop through a private tunnel, turned out to be the missing layer of the whole architecture. GUTS is no longer a diagram of seven abstract organs. It is a private factory on one always-on machine: tmux gives the workers persistent bodies, a built browser Bridge gives the human a window and a lock, and every organ in the old cortex now has a physical place to stand.
This page is the architecture in one piece: what exists, what routes through what, the rules that keep it honest, and the order it gets built in.
The browser is not running the factory. The browser is a window into the machine running the factory. A tmux session is a worker's body: it survives disconnects, network changes, phone-to-desktop handoffs, and overnight runs. The agent process inside it is the worker's mind. GONS is the foreman that decides when bodies are created, inspected, redirected, or stopped. GIMS is the record of what the bodies did. Everything else in GUTS is built on that physical fact.
GUTS did not arrive here in one step, and pretending otherwise would hide the argument. Each generation kept the previous one's best idea and fixed its biggest absence.
The organ map: coordination, memory, relevance, intent, artifacts, allocation, market: the primitives every organization runs on, named and separated. What it lacked: a body. Nothing ran anywhere.
The deepest structural idea: organs don't talk to each other; they talk to the substrate. One append-only ledger, every operation a sentence. What it lacked: a machine for the ledger to describe.
One always-on machine, tmux worker bodies, a private network, a built Bridge. The ledger is still the substrate, but now every sentence in it is something a real session actually did. The organs become layers of a running system.
The old cortex drew seven co-equal organs around a shared center. The factory is more honest: the organs depend on each other in a definite order, and the order is the build order.
One Linux box that stays on. tmux holds persistent worker bodies; Tailscale is the private conduit (Serve only, never public); the GUTS Bridge is the human's window: lock screen, session tabs, dashboard cards, and the first spark of agent awareness: it already knows when an agent has stopped and is waiting on you.
Every factory action becomes a sentence — subject · verb · object · at · by · under — in an append-only ledger: events, the session ledger, work claims, questions and answers, approvals, artifacts, episodes. The grammar that survived a regulated lab is what the factory trusts its own memory to. The other organs have state; GIMS is state.
GONS splits in two. GONS-Core is the boring, reliable foreman: spawns and monitors sessions, routes every question, tracks heartbeats, enforces operating modes, writes it all to GIMS, packages raw session life into episodes. GONS-Console is where the human stays sovereign: the daily brief, cited answers, the approval queue, redirection in plain language.
Five modes over one algebra — Events, Tensions, Anomalies: extract anomalies, infer tensions, reconstruct evidence, design controls, and (the humble mode) prepare structured handoff packets for a stronger reasoner. GEDS passes the ball to LeBron. It digests episodes, not raw logs, and it knows when it does not know.
Generalized beyond repos: goal → project/campaign → sprint → task → action. A coding sprint is one subtype; a marketing campaign, a job search, a compliance push decompose the same way. GOMS defines the work; GONS gives it bodies: a GOMS task becomes a tmux session in a git worktree holding a GIMS work claim.
GEMS is the artifact map — a read-view over GIMS, since artifacts are already ledger sentences. GAMS is allocation over a living topology. GRAMS is the membrane to the external market. All three are real designs and none of them gate the factory. Do not build the whole mansion.
The layers stay coherent because a small set of rules is enforced everywhere, from the lock screen to the merge gate. These are load-bearing; everything else is furniture.
Every action in the factory (a session spawned, a file captured, a question asked, an approval granted) is one append-only record in the GIMS grammar. Nothing is edited or deleted; corrections are new verbs (correct, supersede, retract). Absence becomes computable: a heartbeat that should exist and doesn't is itself a signal.
Agents never inject text into each other's terminals. Every question routes through the foreman and lands in the ledger, so every exchange is attributable, replayable, and visible in the Console. tmux is the last-mile display, not the source of truth.
No capability ships before its observability. The event spine (MVP 2) precedes the foreman (MVP 3); the foreman precedes interpretation (MVP 5); interpretation precedes generalized execution (MVP 7). This is the same append-only, attributable, tamper-evident discipline the GIMS compliance derivative sells into pharma, applied to the factory itself. You cannot trust what you cannot audit.
The Bridge locks. Access tiers separate viewing from operating from administering. Operating modes (Normal, No Outbound, No Code Changes, No Spending, Backup Only, Pause All Agents) are enforced before execution, not painted on the UI. Dangerous actions (kill a session, push to main, run a migration, spend money, send anything external) require explicit confirmation and leave a sentence in the ledger.
The mansion is not built all at once. Each MVP rung is boring, useful, and observable on its own, and each makes the next one cheaper. The first proof is not artificial general management; it is: can one laptop behave like a private, observable, agentic factory with a human-readable Bridge?
Deep pages carry the full argument for each. This is the map.
Parallel agents do not share a working directory and hope. Each gets a body, a branch, and a claim; merging back is a human decision.
Each agent runs in its own git worktree on its own branch, inside its own tmux session. Before it touches anything it takes a work claim in GIMS: a scoped, expiring ownership record over specific paths. GONS-Core will orchestrate the sessions, GEDS checks diffs against the architecture's tensions, and nothing reaches main without human approval. The Bridge's session cards grow into agent cards:
The Bridge already ships the primitive form of this: one card per session, working directory, last output line, and a border that turns ready-green the moment an agent stops and waits for you. That detection (screen-hash comparison across polls, settled after three failed simpler approaches) is the embryo of GONS-Core's heartbeat.
The perimeter is Tailscale plus a lock screen; that part is built. The tiers and modes below are the designed expansion, enforced before execution, every use logged as a sentence.
Each rung has a single sentence that defines done. Two are done. The ladder is the argument.
Tailscale, SSH, tmux; Claude Code runs on the machine from the phone.
Private browser control surface: lock screen, session tabs, dashboard cards, agent-stopped detection, defaults replay. Loopback-only bind behind Tailscale Serve, never public, never Funnel.
Event store, session ledger, work claims, message records; the Bridge emits its first sentences. GIMS stops being adjacent to the factory and becomes its memory.
Sessions spawned from structured tasks, heartbeats tracked, questions routed, operating modes enforced, replies delivered.
The conversational interface over the ledger: daily brief, cited answers, approval queue, devlogs on demand.
The E/T/A schema, controlled corpora (normal, known-abnormal, ambiguous), and anomaly extraction that must prove itself against knowns before it opines on unknowns.
Tension inference, evidence reconstruction, control design, and the live handoff packet: the full five-mode engine.
Goal → campaign → sprint → task → action across domains, with sessions created through GONS and every task, approval, and output in the ledger.
Deliberately not being built yet: full GRAMS labor-market complexity, full GAMS allocation, integrations to every external service, autonomous outbound communication, self-modifying roles, public exposure, spending autonomy, multi-user permissions. These are later layers of the mansion; the hallway comes first.
A private factory on one always-on machine, where tmux provides persistent worker bodies, the Bridge gives the human a window and a lock, GIMS writes every action into institutional memory, GONS runs the floor and briefs the owner, GEDS prepares relevance and anomaly handoffs for higher reasoning, and GOMS turns general goals into executable campaigns and sprints.
This is not a remote-terminal setup. It is the first practical skeleton of coordinated agent labor: small enough to sit on a desk, honest enough to audit, and already running its first organ.