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John Attebury
John Attebury

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Looking for a few design partners for Topogram, an early spec-and-proof layer for teams using coding agents to evolve real software

I’m looking for a small number of design partners to review an early project called Topogram.

Topogram is aimed at a specific problem:

how do humans and coding agents evolve real software without letting intent, generated outputs, and verification drift apart?

The core idea is simple:

  • keep durable software intent explicit
  • generate contracts and runnable artifacts from that intent
  • keep verification attached to the same source of truth
  • make it clearer what should stay generated, what should stay hand-maintained, and what should stop for human review

This is not a “prompt to product” tool and it is not a production-ready platform.

The current wedge is narrower:

  • brownfield recovery and reconcile/adopt workflows
  • maintained-app change guidance
  • proof-oriented generated artifacts and verification
  • explicit safe, guarded, and no-go boundaries for agent-assisted change

The repo already has working proof surfaces for:

  • generated examples across multiple domains
  • brownfield recovery on real stacks
  • a maintained proof app that shows how Topogram can guide edits to existing code
  • explicit single-agent and bounded multi-agent planning surfaces

If that problem space is familiar, I’d love a limited round of review from people across a real software team, especially:

  • developers and technical leads already using coding agents on real systems
  • product designers and UX people who care about where agent assistance should stop and human judgment should stay in the loop
  • product owners who feel the cost when workflow intent, implementation, and review drift apart
  • teams working on brownfield systems rather than only Greenfield demos
  • people who are opinionated about contracts, architecture, workflow semantics, and review boundaries

Good fit:

  • cross-functional software teams comfortable with early infrastructure
  • people willing to react to a real repo, proof docs, and evaluator path
  • teams with one contained workflow or subsystem they’d use to pressure-test this
  • teams where engineering, design, and product all have a stake in how changes are proposed, reviewed, and verified

Bad fit:

  • teams looking for a no-code builder
  • teams expecting production-ready auth or deployment hardening today
  • teams wanting a generic agent runtime or orchestration platform

If you want to take a look, the best starting points are:

If you’re interested, the current lightweight path is:

  • open a GitHub issue: attebury/topogram/issues
  • use the title prefix alpha interest:
  • include:
    • what kind of codebase or system you’re working on
    • whether the main pressure is brownfield recovery, maintained-app evolution, or proof/verification
    • where coding agents are helping today, and where they’re drifting

What I’m looking for right now is not broad attention. I’m looking for a few sharp conversations with teams who actually feel this problem from different angles: engineering, design, UX, and product.

If that’s you, I’d really appreciate the review.

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