PACKING LIST

What's in the crate

Five seats, one drivetrain — each with a duty, a sandbox, and a tested harness.

Part No.	Seat	Duty
CE-01	Orchestrator	the team lead you talk to — plans the loop, dispatches the seats, holds every decision for you
CE-02	Coder	implements on a branch, proves the build, merges only on your word
CE-03	Reviewer	adversarial code review, read-only by construction — approval is a verdict, never a merge
CE-04	Designer	visual & UX design, mobile-first, locked with you before a line is built
CE-05	QA	drives the real app in a real browser — screenshots, console, verdicts it refuses to fake

Fuel not included — by design. The seats run on your own AI agents and subscriptions (Claude Code, Pi, Codex CLI). Crate Engine never installs or signs into anything on your behalf; it detects your crew and staffs it.

START PROCEDURE

How it fires

A crate engine isn't a kit — it arrives assembled and tuned. Three steps between the crowbar and your first shipped feature.

STEP 1 / UNCRATE

One line installs it

Terminal, engine, workspace, the crate command — everything laid down, your existing AI agents detected and reported honestly.

curl -fsSL … | bash

STEP 2 / FIRE UP

Staff and boot

Five clicks through the wizard — staff the seats from your detected agents, point at a repo, boot. Five panes come up, orient themselves, and report ready.

→ "the rig is up — what shall we build first?"

STEP 3 / DRIVE

Direct in plain English

Say what you want. The team designs, builds, reviews and tests in parallel — then holds at the merge gate until you say the word.

→ "Merge it."

SCRUTINEERING

The scrutineers are built in

In racing, nothing touches the track until the scrutineers sign off. Same rule here — enforced by the machine, on every lap.

▪ Sandbox walls, OS-level

Full autonomy inside, containment outside. Agents run free behind real OS walls; writes can't leave your project.

▪ You are the merge gate

Review approval is a verdict, never a trigger. The team holds at the gate until your word releases it.

▪ SHA-tied proof gates

The build must pass on the exact commit before review ever starts. No "works on my branch," no stale green.

▪ Adversarial review + real QA

A read-only reviewer attacks the diff while QA drives the real app and brings back screenshots — in parallel.

▪ Evidence, not vibes

Every verdict ships with receipts: gate logs, screenshots, an event trail you can replay.

▪ Refuses loudly

Missing sign-in, dead seat, stale build — the machine stops and names the blocker. A dead seat comes back with one click.

▪ A real cockpit

Five live panes streaming each agent's actual work — watch, chat, and hold the merge gate. No black box.

▪ Your tune survives updates

Workflows, skills, and overrides live in your own overlay. Engine updates slide in underneath — your personalization is never clobbered.

FLEET OPERATIONS

No limits

One crate, as many teams as you can drive — every workspace is another five-agent team, running in parallel.

The Crate Engine app mid-loop: five seat panes streaming each agent's real work — the orchestrator thread on the left holds the merge gate

LIVE CAPTURE · A FIVE-SEAT TEAM MID-LOOP · THE MERGE GATE WAITS ON YOU

ENDURANCE

Context is fuel. State is the machine.

Agent context windows bloat and rot. Crate Engine treats them as consumable — burn, pit, refuel — while the truth lives on disk.

▪ State lives in files, not chat

Every seat writes its truth to the repo: session state, progress docs, an event log that outranks any context window. Scrollback is never load-bearing.

▪ Stopping costs nothing

.checkpoint, close the window, walk away. Tomorrow: crate open, one click, five seats come back oriented — reading state, not remembering it.

▪ Seats are disposable. The team isn't.

A bloated or dead seat relaunches fresh in one click and picks up mid-race from its binder and state files. No archaeology, no re-explaining.