01
why it came alive
Our state was scattered across repositories, task lists, decisions, GitHub activity, docs, and whatever each of us had open in a coding session. Answering “where do we stand?” meant reconstructing the work by hand, every time.
02
what it became
Orbit is the studio’s mission control. Every repository orbits it, and it answers live: where do we stand, what’s on me, who is working on what right now. It owns our tasks, derives repository state from GitHub instead of asking anyone to type it, holds live presence, and wires every coding agent into the same board. A session opens already knowing where its repository stands, and leaves its work behind on the board instead of in the chat.
// what it answers
Five questions, one board.
Captures from Orbit’s product tour. Open any one to look closer.
- Q-01
what’s moving right now?
The home screen is an orbital map. The studio sits at the centre and every repository orbits it: recent work sits close and bright, neglected work drifts outward and dims, so staleness reads as distance. A repository pulses while one of us is in it, and presence clears itself the moment that session ends. No heartbeats, no ghost “still working”. Tasks in the side rail light up the code they will touch, so two people heading for the same files show up as a collision before it happens.
- Q-02
what is it waiting on?
A task carries its state, priority, owner, blockers and the work it supersedes or releases. Tasks are written by people and by agents through one door: the CLI, the board and every agent session go through the same API, so there is one write path and nothing to reconcile.
- Q-03
where do we stand?
The brief is the calm counterpart to the map. On us gathers everything waiting on a human across every repository: parked questions and handoffs, one list instead of eight. Below it, a card per repository with its memo, the prose paragraph on where it really is, dated by commits since it was written rather than by hours.
- Q-04
what affects what?
Orbit groups repositories into products from tracked dependency evidence and shows releases, blockers and drift between them. When one repository pins another below what it has published, the consumer says so. Neither repository can see that alone; that is the whole reason mission control exists.
- Q-05
what did they work on?
Every session leaves a memo and a note of what it actually changed. Standup reads them back per person, with what closed and what was decided as evidence underneath. Orbit gathers; it doesn’t summarise. When nothing was recorded it says so, because “the record is empty” and “they did nothing” are different claims.
// the agent loop
Every session starts informed and leaves a record.
Most of our work happens in coding-agent sessions scoped to one repository. Orbit closes the loop between those sessions and us, so knowledge doesn’t die when a chat ends.
- 01read arrow
Sessions start oriented.
Open an agent in a repository and it is handed where that repository stands: the latest memo, what is on you there, and at most five ranked facts from the project graph. No re-explaining, no cd-ing around to find out.
- 02write arrow
Work lands on the board.
Shared MCP tools let the agent file tasks, move them, and write the memo when it is done. When enough has landed, the session is asked to rewrite where things stand before it closes, weighted so a merge asks and a typo doesn’t.
- 03ask a teammate
Forks become questions.
When an agent hits a decision that belongs to a person, it parks the question on the brief. The answer travels back to the session that asked, even mid-run.
// staying true
Nothing on the board claims to be current when it isn’t.
Every surface shows dated prose, and prose starts rotting the moment it is written. Four derived checks keep it honest, and none of them needs anybody to remember anything.
A memo says “8 commits ago”, not “3 hours ago”. Time is the wrong unit: an afternoon can sit a merge behind.
Docs and open tasks are ranked by decision debt: how many decisions were accepted after each was last written. Ranked, not flagged.
When one repository pins another below what it has published, the card says so, across repositories that can’t see each other.
A number in a doc can cite the command that produced it. orbit verify re-runs it, and the output is the expectation, so there is no second copy to go stale.
The sim reaches the Proof on **day 258** <!-- orbit:verify ./run --winnable -->
$orbit verify
# when the doc agrees
✓ roadmap.md:34 — 258
# when the code has moved and the prose hasn't
✗ roadmap.md:34 — the command says "258", the doc doesn't say it
doc: The sim reaches the Proof on **day 257**
03
the salvage trail
What this project took from the pile, and what it put back.
← borrowed from the yard
The yard's Kraft Paper and Blueprint Navy, put to work on a tool we open every day.
Repository docs, decisions, task state, and session notes remain distinct sources; Orbit connects them instead of flattening them.
left behind for the yard →
Its recall layer and read-only MCP tools became NYX’s knowledge and tool surface.
A rule for anything we publish later: we choose what goes public, and nobody gets anonymous access to the private workspace.
where it stands · now
Running for the two of us behind GitHub sign-in: a Phoenix service, PostgreSQL, a Go CLI, a task board, presence, recall, docs, and agent tools. It's private today. A public site and a public board don't exist yet.
No public board yet · the private workspace stays private.