Four weeks after the work-harness post: cairn learned to keep its own documentation honest, run entire phases unattended inside a token budget, and — twice now — catch its own bugs in the act and ship the fixes. Here’s what a self-running work harness actually looks like, receipts included.
Six weeks of shipping turned cairn from a wrapper around other people’s tools into a full work harness — a four-vendor AI review council, a portfolio board, a platform-native rebuild, and the honest answer to the question that review surfaced: who is cairn actually competing with?
Four real products — a multi-cloud tag and storage tool, a resume tailor, an OKR tracker, and the planning system underneath all of it — built and shipped in about three weeks. What made it fast, what I got wrong, and what AI still can’t do for you.
An agent project brain that plans your project, mirrors every piece of work to your real issue tracker, remembers what it learned, and verifies what it shipped — born a Claude Code plugin, now running on Grok, Copilot, Codex, Gemini, Cursor, OpenCode, and Zed too.
Zero to a tracker-mirrored project in about fifteen minutes — install cairn, wire up your issue tracker (including every step that happens outside Claude), and run your first phase.