How the work gets made now: the studio toolchain

Nine AI agents, a context bus, three hard gates, and a riso pipeline that runs in a terminal. What we actually used to produce the last five months of client work.

Every project page on this site shows the finished thing. This post is about the machine behind it, because the machine is the point. The simplicity of the work relies entirely on the execution stack underneath it.

The agent mesh

The studio runs as a mesh of nine agents, each with a lane. An orchestrator (Claude Opus) routes work and holds the review gate. A second Claude handles standard coding and ticket scoping. Kimi runs the review gate and research. Kilo takes long-context reads. Sisyphus does mechanical code. Pi handles cheap research passes. Copilot owns GitHub-native ops. Hermes posts to Slack. A local MLX model does offline triage. One ticket, one owner, one git worktree. The producer and the reviewer are never the same model.

The harness

Work moves through three hard gates, enforced by scripts, not vibes: a payment gate (no deposit, no pixels), a QA and brand gate (every check attested before review), and a human approval gate (nothing ships, posts, or deploys without sign-off). A context bus passes tasks between agents as JSON mailboxes. Every session closes by logging to six systems: Linear, Airtable, PocketBase, Craft, Google Drive, and long-term memory.

Creative tooling

• Python generators - brand marks, spec sheets, banners, and Greek lettering are drawn as code, so a revision is a rerun, not a redraw.
• Manim - procedural motion. Logo reveals and network animations in locked brand colors.
• Hyperframes - social reels composed as code: 20-reel libraries, not one-off edits.
• Blender (Python API) - 3D exploration with GLB export, gated by audit before anything reaches a client.
• The riso pipeline - zine pages written in HTML/CSS, rendered by headless Chrome, screened through a real CMYK halftone (halftonecv), then misregistered, grained, and ink-bled with ImageMagick. Every round git-tagged.
• Illustrator + Paper - masters and editable sources live where designers can actually touch them.

Infrastructure

Review portals and asset libraries self-hosted on Fly.io. Review rounds tracked in Airtable. A digital asset manager on PocketBase indexing 400+ files per project. Print production through the Printful API with per-placement upscaling. Tickets in Linear. Everything reconciled, every session.

Why we are telling you

Because this is what a small studio looks like in 2026: not a bigger team, a better harness. The creative calls stay human. The execution, the versioning, the QA panels, the deploys, the logging - that is the mesh. Future posts in this series will break down individual pipelines (the riso chain deserves its own).