Agents do the work. People decide. The record proves it.
Work moves between people, agents and systems, and a person is asked only where a mistake is expensive. The agents run on your machines; you work on the web, the desktop and your phone.
Nobody knows which agent to trust, so everyone is asked about everything.
Delivery today is people, agents and a dozen tools. The people who should decide spend the day answering questions a record could have answered, and the few decisions that are expensive get the same attention as the rest.
- 01
Work changes hands all day, and its context does not. A hand-off lives in a chat thread, not on the task.
- 02
Load and cost show up only at month-end. By then the plan and the hours have already parted.
- 03
The spec keeps moving after sign-off. Nobody can say which change was approved, or by whom.
- 04
The code cannot leave the network. So a hosted agent is not an option at all.
One standard way to run delivery, with an agent at every step.
Every task carries its stage and its owner, a person and their agent. Trust is measured per stage, and merge, release and money always ask. Eighty-four seconds, captioned, no voice-over.
What the film shows
A painted office. Delivery today is people, agents and a dozen tools. Work changes hands all day and its context does not. Nobody knows which agent to trust, so everyone is asked about everything. Load and cost show up only at month-end, the spec keeps moving after sign-off, and the code cannot leave the network.
Then the real product. Every task carries its stage and its owner, a person and their agent. Trust is measured per stage, and merge, release and money always ask. On the phone a merge is held, then confirmed with Face ID, never a typed yes. Everyone's load shows actual against plan across every project. Stories are accepted one by one, and a change after sign-off becomes a change request approved by name. Runners run on the customer's machines; Alicorn hosts no model and holds no key.
Every company and person in the film is fictional.Download the film (MP4, 15 MB).
Web, desktop and phone, on one knowledge layer.
Web
My work and Inbox across projects; the board, requirements and task detail inside one. Capacity shows everyone's load, actual against plan, across every project.
Desktop
The same app on the desktop, where the agent development environment lives, beside the repositories your agents work in.
Phone
For deciding, directing and glancing. A gate opens as a sheet with its evidence; a merge is held, then confirmed with Face ID, never from the lock screen.
An assistant on every screen
Chat or voice, scoped to where you are, with preview, act and undo. On the phone it has its own tab, Talk. It never passes a hard stop.
Your tracker comes in once
Jira, Easy8 and Plane come in by one-way import, and Alicorn owns the work from then on.
Your ERP keeps the money
Rates, budgets and planned allocation are read in from the ERP; worklogs and accepted delivery reports go back nightly.
Author the standard once. Every project runs on it.
The organization writes its method, workflows, templates and agent roles once. Every project forks that standard and may tighten it, never remove a hard stop. Work is organised as organization, project and task, and a task is the unit that changes hands.
Each person drives an agent team
A person is the unit of accountability. Every task shows its stage and its owner, a person and their agent, so a hand-off is on the task, not buried in chat. An agent never outranks its owner: every agent call carries a narrower token than its owner's.
Done is a required check
Requirements carry acceptance criteria, and each criterion is a required check. Checks are authored on the stage, so a member cannot loosen its own criteria. Review runs on a different provider from the author.
Hard stops always ask
Merge, release and money always ask the named role, whatever the track record says. No voice command or typed yes passes one, and a release cannot be approved by the person whose agent built it.
The record is measured
Every step is written once to an append-only ledger, and trust is measured per stage from it. Today each gate records what it would have decided and still asks; a gate is let go later, stage by stage, on measured evidence.
One delivery standard, G0 to G5
- G0 · Estimatethe work is estimated before anything is built
- G1 · Readyno signed Definition of Ready, no Build; the client's specification and its open questions are part of it
- G2 · Build Hard stop: mergeagents build on your runners, each task on its own branch
- G3 · Verifyevery required check passes
- G4 · Accept Hard stop: releasestories are accepted one by one; a change after sign-off is a change request, approved by name
- G5 · Invoice Hard stop: moneyaccepted delivery goes back to the ERP
The built-in standard puts merge at Build, release at Accept and money at Invoice. A project can move a hard stop to another stage, never remove it.
From asking about everything to asking where it matters.
The bridge is one delivery standard with a required check for done, a hard stop at merge, release and money, and a record of every step.
| Topic | Before | With Alicorn |
|---|---|---|
| Trust | Every step asks a person, because nobody knows which agent to trust. | Trust is measured per stage from the ledger. Today every gate records what it would have decided and still asks; a gate is let go later, stage by stage, on evidence. |
| Hand-off | A hand-off is a message in a chat thread. | The task carries its stage and its owner, a person and their agent. |
| Load and cost | Load and cost show up at month-end. | Capacity shows actual against plan across every project; worklogs go back to the ERP nightly. |
| Scope | The spec moves after sign-off. | Stories are accepted one by one; a change after sign-off is a change request, approved by name. |
| Where it runs | The code cannot leave the network, so agents stay out. | Agents run on runners you own, and model calls go through a gateway your organization runs. |
It runs on your machines. A person holds every hard stop.
Alicorn hosts no model and holds no key. The work, the code and the model calls stay inside your network, and every step is on the record.
- Stages in the delivery standard, G0 to G5
- 6
- Hard stops that always ask a person: merge, release, money
- 3
- Models Alicorn hosts, and model keys it holds
- 0
Execution stays with you
Agents run on runners you own, in pools for you, your team or a client network. Model calls go through a gateway your organization runs, with an allow-list per data class, budgets and audit. Sensitive data runs on-premises with no cloud fallback.
Hard stops always ask a person
Merge, release and money ask the named role, whatever the track record says. No voice command or typed yes passes one, and a release cannot be approved by the person whose agent built it. An agent never outranks its owner.
Every step on the ledger
Each step is written once to an append-only ledger: what ran, what verified it and who decided. Trust is measured from it, per stage, and nothing is let go without that evidence.
- Self-hosted in your region. One Helm chart on AKS, OpenShift or Azure Local, in your own EU region. Secrets stay in your vault; sessions get short-lived credentials.
- Tenants isolated in the database. Every row carries its organization, and row-level security is forced in Postgres, even for an organization of one.
- Sign-in through your identity provider. You land in your organization, scoped to the projects you belong to.
- Nothing moves on a guess. A started task never moves. A runner that loses contact is marked unverifiable, never exited, and nothing falls back silently to a laptop, a cheaper model or another data class.
What people ask first.
Does Alicorn host a model or hold our model keys?
No. The control plane hosts no inference and holds no model key. Model calls go through a gateway your organization runs, with an allow-list per data class, budgets and audit.
Where does it run?
In your own infrastructure: one Helm chart on AKS, OpenShift or Azure Local, in your own EU region. Agents run on runners you own, in pools for you, your team or a client network.
Can an agent merge, release or spend money on its own?
No. Merge, release and money are hard stops: they always ask the named role. No voice command or typed yes passes one, and a project may move a hard stop to another stage but never remove it.
Does Alicorn make decisions for us?
Not yet. The decision layer ships observe-only: it records what it would have decided and is calibrated per question, and nothing it answers is acted on. Every gate still asks a person. Switching a question on is a later decision, per stage, from measured calibration, and it never passes a hard stop.
What happens when a runner goes offline?
A started task never moves. A runner that loses contact is marked unverifiable, never exited, and nothing is rescheduled on a guess or falls back silently to a laptop.
We already use Jira. Do we have to keep both?
No. Jira, Easy8 and Plane come in by one-way import, and Alicorn owns the work from then on.
From your email to your first task.
Enter your work email on the sign-in page. A new address gets a sign-in link, then names its organization, and you own it. Running it in your own cluster? The quickstart has the Helm chart and every command.
Create your organization
Enter your work email and open the link we send. If your company signs in with its own provider, your email takes you there instead.
Get the desktop app
Download it below and sign in with the same email.
Enrol a runner
Mint a code on the Runners screen, then run alicorn-runner enroll <code> and alicorn-runner start on the machine that will do the work.
The desktop app
macOS today; Windows and Linux with their first release