Write your goals once.
A short charter: what you are optimizing for, and how much risk Colony may take getting there. Plain language. Versioned, so you can change direction as deliberately as you set it.
The Strategist
Stop assigning tickets. Start setting direction.
Colony’s Strategist turns your goals into a standing engineering plan. Each week it reads the pipeline’s own signals — what shipped, what stalled, what it cost — and sets where effort goes next. Work it selects inside your charter ships through the same reviewed, cost-attributed pipeline as everything else. You set the direction. Colony does the rest. Today this runs on Colony’s own repositories.
The top of the ladder
The autonomy ladder ends here.
Four ways to run Colony: you assign the work; you shape how work flows; you delegate an area and it finds the work; you set the goals and it manages its own backlog toward them. The Strategist is the fourth rung. See the product overview.
How it works
Goals in, shipped work out.
Three steps, and only the first is yours to write.
It plans every week.
The Strategist reads what actually happened — cycle time, cost concentration, stalled issues, repeat failures — and sets the next allocation with the reasoning attached. Every plan is on the record.
It ships.
Work inside the charter envelope is queued, built, reviewed and merged automatically — Colony’s own development runs this way in production today. Anything bigger than the envelope escalates to you first. Every change still passes review, your branch protection, and the audit trail: autonomy at the planning layer never skips discipline at the merge layer.
Guardrails, in plain English
You set the envelope. It cannot spend outside it.
Size cap
Cap the size of work the Strategist may queue on its own. Anything bigger escalates to you.
Prefer and avoid
Name the work to prefer and the work to leave alone.
Always a human
Define the conditions that always route to a person.
The envelope is enforced by the pipeline when a plan is applied, not by the prompt. A proposal that outgrows it fails closed.
Why you can trust it
Every decision on the record.
Every decision is on the record.
Each plan, each selection, each merge and each override is in the audit trail with attribution. You can pause the Strategist or tighten the envelope at any moment.
The envelope is enforced by the pipeline, not the prompt.
A proposal that outgrows it fails closed.
It runs on us first.
The Strategist directs Colony’s own development today — the self-improvement work visible in the public ledger ships this way.
For engineers: full charter and API reference in the docs.
Direct with goals. Colony ships.
Talk to us about what a charter for your repositories would look like.