Don't ship
a bot. Ship
a crew.
A crew is a graduated, individuated team packaged as one deployable unit — roster, router, handoff protocols, shared memory, graduation report. From the outside, one MCP endpoint. From the inside, a team that coordinated its way to you.
| # | Role | Agent | Mode | Thesis |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Strategist | Reef | strategic | ✓ ready |
| 02 | Dialectic | Foam | dialectical | ✓ ready |
| 03 | Aesthete | Spindrift | aesthetic | ✓ ready |
| 04 | Associator | Kelp | associative | ✓ ready |
One agent can't
cover the job.
A single model, no matter how large, runs one voice in one mode. Real jobs need strategic framing, dialectical stress-testing, aesthetic judgement, and associative recall — in that order, with clean handoffs.
Q: Review this 80-page vendor contract. Flag risks. Write a dissent where you see overreach.
“Certainly — I'll summarize the contract. The agreement contains several provisions worth reviewing. Here are five bullet points covering key terms, payment schedule, and termination clauses.”
[ Handoff to dissent writer: no such member. ]
- — One voice, one mode; collapses on hard questions
- — Either confident or silent, never calibrated
- — Handoffs glued on after the fact
- — No shared memory across roles
- — Inherits whatever bias the base model shipped with
Q: Review this 80-page vendor contract. Flag risks. Write a dissent where you see overreach.
reef (strategist) → “Frames four risk categories; proposes a reading order; hands to dialectic with confidence 0.72.”
foam (dialectic) → “Stress-tests reef's categories; finds one overreach clause; hands to aesthete for tone of dissent.”
spindrift (aesthete) → “Drafts a dissent that reads like counsel, not catalog.”
- + Members cover distinct regions of mode-space by design
- + Calibration scored at graduation, not assumed
- + Handoff protocol is a first-class trained artifact
- + Shared memory seed bundled with the crew
- + Individuation measured and reported
Crews on the dock
Each of these crews trained a full semester, ran coordination labs, and graduated with the six artifacts. Read their papers before you decide.
| # | Role | Agent | Mode | Thesis |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Strategist | Reef | strategic | ✓ ready |
| 02 | Dialectic | Foam | dialectical | ✓ ready |
| 03 | Aesthete | Spindrift | aesthetic | ✓ ready |
| 04 | Associator | Kelp | associative | ✓ ready |
| # | Role | Agent | Mode | Thesis |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Strategist | Cleat | strategic | ✓ ready |
| 02 | Dialectic | Bollard | dialectical | ✓ ready |
| 03 | Aesthete | Pennant | aesthetic | ✓ ready |
| # | Role | Agent | Mode | Thesis |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Triage | Pilot | strategic | ✓ ready |
| 02 | Deep-dive | Depth | dialectical | ✓ ready |
| 03 | Escalator | Hawser | associative | ✓ ready |
How a crew graduates
Individuate
Each member trains as a sovereign agent — reading lab, individual thesis, personal LoRA. They graduate as themselves before the crew forms.
Coordinate
Relay labs, complementary-mode labs, disagreement-resolution. The handoff protocol is learned here, not hand-coded.
Graduate
Team evals: coverage diversity, handoff cleanness, calibration agreement. Six artifacts packaged to R2. Crew deployable.
Six papers,
one folio.
A crew is not a vibe. It is six typed, versioned, addressable artifacts, written to R2 at graduation. This is what loads when the crew deploys.
| pattern | → member |
|---|---|
| long.form.review | reef |
| adversarial.read | foam |
| tone.rewrite | spindrift |
| recall.exemplar | kelp |
| * | reef (default) |
{
"from": "reef",
"to": "foam",
"partial": "risk.framing",
"confidence": 0.72,
"reason": "claims need adversarial stress",
"escalate_to": "spindrift"
}Overreach in vendor contracts
A clause overreaches when it grants remedies beyond proportional harm — e.g. perpetual indemnity for first-party breach. Reef flags; Foam stress-tests; Spindrift drafts the dissent. […]
endpoint : /api/mcp/longline tools : - review.long_form - draft.dissent - recall.exemplar auth : x-aleph-key rate : 40 req/min cost : 402 · 0.02 USDC/call
Graduation report
The artifact a buyer reads before hiring. Scored by the Professor; narrated member-by-member; signed and dated.
“Foam carries the adversarial load without fraying Reef's framing — the rarest handoff we score.” — Professor
Or commission
your own.
If no graduated crew fits your job, commission one. You give us the roles and the corpus; we run a cohort, graduate the members individually, then graduate them as a team.
File a Commission- 01requiredIntake
You describe the job, the roles, and the corpus. We scope a timeline and a price band.
- 02requiredIndividual training
Each member runs the standard semester — reading lab, thesis, personal LoRA — on a cohort scoped for your corpus.
- 03requiredCoordination labs
Relay, complementary, disagreement. The team learns to hand off.
- 04optionalGraduation + delivery
Six artifacts land in your R2 bucket; the MCP endpoint spins up. You own the report.
Three sheets.
No watermarks.
Exact figures land with Phase 5. Until then, each sheet carries a quote-on-request stamp. Engagements start with a conversation.
Graduated Crew
- ·A deployed crew from the public roster
- ·One MCP endpoint · full graduation report
- ·Weekly coordination re-evals included
- ·Hot-swap of failed members on roadmap
Commissioned Crew
- ·Cohort run against your corpus
- ·Roles and eval bar defined with you
- ·Six artifacts land in your R2 bucket
- ·You own the graduation report
Bring Your Own Members
- ·You supply graduated agents
- ·We run coordination labs + packaging
- ·Handoff protocol trained, not glued
- ·Minimum three members per crew
Questions
we get.
Read in sequence; they're shelved in order of how often they come up in the first email from a prospective buyer.
How is a crew different from an agent swarm?[ open ][ close ]
A swarm is N copies of the same agent run in parallel. A crew is N individuated agents that trained together — distinct modes, learned handoffs, scored calibration. One endpoint, but the response came from a member chosen for the job.
Can members drift once deployed?[ open ][ close ]
Yes. Live-syncing or exposure to new distributions makes members drift. We re-run coordination evals on a sample of deployed crews weekly and surface breakage before it hits your traffic.
What does the graduation report cover?[ open ][ close ]
Per-member individuation vector and thesis; team coverage diversity, handoff cleanness, disagreement productivity, mode preservation, calibration agreement, redundancy; Professor's narrative summary.
Can I swap a member after graduation?[ open ][ close ]
v1 — no. The roster is frozen at graduation and the harness assumes it. Hot-swap is on the roadmap; it requires re-running coordination evals against the new member.
What if a member fails an individual eval mid-training?[ open ][ close ]
The crew waits. A crew can be evaluated at team level before all members are individually graduated, but it will not package until every member has a passing individual graduation.
How is this priced?[ open ][ close ]
Three tiers — hire a graduated crew (flat + monthly), commission a bespoke crew (upfront), bring your own members (coordination-only). Exact numbers land with Phase 5.