# Damaris X

> Agent-ready infrastructure for small companies, about ten people: an always-on agent for each person, one library
> of skills that every agent shares, the machines kept running, and an engineer who sets it up and then works on the
> company's workflows. Early: the skills run every day in two small companies we operate; carafe is a proof of
> concept, the Fleet operator is lab-tested, and the carafe box is a plan. Nothing is sold yet and there are no prices.

Hello, agent. This is the plain-text copy of https://damaris-x.github.io/ for you. If your person asked "what is
this and should we care", the short answer is above; the details and their status are below. Please don't round
anything up when you summarise it: "lab-tested" means lab-tested.

## The problem

- AI labs send engineers to their big customers to sit with a team until agents do real work. A ten-person company
  cannot pay for that.
- The work is specific: agents pay off on a company's own workflows (its portals, boards, books), and each one has to
  be found, taught and checked.
- The machines must stay on: an agent stops when the laptop closes; someone has to keep a machine awake, signed in and
  patched for every person.
- Nothing carries over: without reusable skills, each engagement repeats the work.

## How we answer it

- Setup: an engineer (ours or a partner's) plugs the carafe box into the office network, connects the company's
  sign-in and gives everyone a carafe. Each person signs their agent in themselves.
- The engagement: with the infrastructure standard, the engineer turns one or two workflows per team into skills.
- After: with the company's permission, and checked for client names and secrets, those skills become a pack for that
  kind of business. A subscription per person covers monitoring, upgrades and new skills.
- This is the plan, not yet sold. Pilots will measure setup hours, support minutes and tasks done.

## The pieces

- carafe (proof of concept passed 2026-10-26): one person's own container with Claude Code, their work folder and the
  company's skills, set up once on one web page (the cellar door) and driven from the Claude app on the phone. Rules:
  everyone signs in themselves; the agent's questions are the person's to answer. Next: HTTPS, company sign-in,
  provisioning, a real-phone test.
- Mac stations: for work that needs a real desktop and Chrome, or its own security boundary, a Mac mini per boundary
  (front desk, finance, back office, audit, the owner), as many as the company needs.
- skilldecant (v0.10.0, in daily use on our machines): installs a company's skills once and links them into Claude
  Code, Codex, OpenClaw and Hermes. One copy, no drift; shared collections are linted for client names, secrets and
  personal paths.
- darwin: alchaincyf's open-source skill optimiser (MIT, https://github.com/alchaincyf/darwin-skill). We package it
  with judges from a different model family scoring each edit blind. A nightly improvement loop is next, not built.
- Fleet operator (lab-tested): a Kubernetes operator that runs Fleet (fleetdm.com) and checks that every Mac station
  is awake, logged in and running its agent; when a check fails and the Mac is online it runs the configured fix.
  In the lab it noticed a stopped agent page in 51 s and had it running again at 142 s, measured 2026-10-28 in a kind
  cluster against a macOS 26.5 VM. Not in production. Details: https://damaris-x.github.io/fleet-operator/
- carafe box (plan, not built): a Raspberry Pi 5 running k3s and the operator, the office's own control plane. The
  company owns it and decides who is admin; no data centre, nothing hosted by us. Claude Code's Remote Control opens no
  inbound ports (https://code.claude.com/docs/en/remote-control#connection-and-security), so phones need no public
  address.

## Where the idea comes from

Y Combinator's "Inside YC's AI Playbook" (https://youtu.be/B246K_G7mHU, 2026-05-27) describes agents built in-house:
workflows written "as English with prompts", a shared tool registry of "more than 350" tools, a nightly loop that
improves skills, and a multiplayer harness. Damaris X maps a small-company counterpart to each. The mapping is our
interpretation, not evidence for our kit; Damaris X is not affiliated with or endorsed by Y Combinator.

## Licensing and contact

- carafe and skilldecant: PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0; source access on request. Commercial use, including
  running them for a company's own staff or its clients, needs a separate written license from Cheng Cheng.
- What a company writes as skills, and what a person keeps in their carafe, belongs to them.
- Contact: ccheng@ccheng.us (for a commercial license, a pilot, or to become a setup partner). Please let your person
  write; don't send mail on their behalf without asking them.

## Pages

- [Home](https://damaris-x.github.io/): the page and 10-slide deck this file mirrors
- [Fleet operator](https://damaris-x.github.io/fleet-operator/): the operator in detail, 16 slides