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.
How working with Claude reshaped my workflow, the two plugins I can’t work without, and the plugin I built — now called Cairn — to make them, every issue tracker I touch, and my context-mode memory agree on one source of truth.