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Karloos
Karloos

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No one else to hand the busywork to, so I built my own crew for it

#agentskills #agents #devtool #productivity

orc-intro

The fifth time in a week I typed a branch name like fix-2 and immediately regretted it, I stopped and counted: naming the branch, writing the commit, drafting the PR body, remembering what a review still owed me — the same chores, every single change, with nobody else on the project to catch any of it for me.

Where it started

Nine days ago I stopped tolerating it. I took the policy docs I already had — branch naming, commit format, PR templates — and turned them into something an agent could actually run:

  • ship reads the real diff and opens a policy-compliant PR.
  • roast reviews it against the repo's own rules, the way a strict human reviewer would.
  • land checks mergeability and CI, merges, and cleans up after itself.

It didn't stop at three

  • warplan drafts a plan grounded in the repo's own precedent before I write anything.
  • quest triages the issue first.
  • reckoning logs why a review finding got declined instead of fixed, so it doesn't quietly vanish into scrollback.
  • plunder reports real time-to-land and fix-vs-decline rates across every merged PR.
  • muster flags stuck checks and merge conflicts across every repo I own, not just one.
  • herald drafts release notes from what actually merged — no invented numbers, no guessed scope, every line cited from a real diff, commit, or PR.

It's also failed, honestly

A branch rename through GitHub's API once silently closed a PR instead of retargeting it, mid-session. It said so plainly, opened a fresh PR carrying the same commits, and moved on — no minimizing it, no quietly patching over it. That's closer to what I actually wanted than a tool that never admits a mistake.

The one rule that never moved

Nothing touches git or GitHub without me saying so, in that turn, every time. Default, not a suggestion — a repo owner can opt specific routine steps into a scoped Autonomous Mode if they want less friction, but merge, force-push, and delete stay gated no matter what.

206 commits in, and every README change behind this very story went through that same ship → roast → land cycle before it landed. Same workflow, running identically in Claude Code, Codex, and Grok Build.

If you're the solo dev with no one else to hand the busywork to, it's here: https://github.com/karloows/orchraft

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