Fleet Series 10 — meta & forge: the Front Door and the Split

Working notes for a planned episode — an outline, not an article. Details will shift when it gets scripted. Series index: Building the Fleet.

Deep dive on the tooling surface: the unified front door (CLI + MCP + skills) over the agents, and the meta/forge repo split — code verbs going public, life verbs staying home.

The hook

A fleet you can't reach is a science project. Every capability in this series is exposed three ways from one codebase: a CLI verb for humans, an MCP tool for agents, and a skill for coding-agent sessions. And in July 2026 the code half moved into a public repo — this episode is both the architecture and the open-sourcing story.

What the viewer walks away with

• The front-door pattern: one implementation, three surfaces (CLI, MCP, skills) — agents and humans drive the same verbs, so there's no "agent API" drifting from the "human API"
• The verb inventory: the build pipeline, the dependency bumper, testing / audit / evals, research and review ensembles, the book researcher — each one is an earlier episode with a handle on it
• The split: code verbs → the public forge repo (Apache-2.0), meta keeps the personal/life verbs — and the boundary line is "would this make sense on someone else's machine?"
• What extraction really costs: shared modules split down the middle, scrubbing internal topology and personal paths, and packaging landmines (editable installs, optional extras so backends keep working)
• Licensing beat: why Apache-2.0 for the shared tooling when my default for hosted projects is AGPL — a deliberate adoption decision

Beats

• Open with the same operation three ways: the CLI in a terminal, an MCP tool call from an agent, a skill invocation in a session
• The playbook: ensemble → task emission → worker pipeline as the standard loop across projects
• The split story: 13 tasks, what moved (ten agent packages, half of the shared modules), what stayed, and the packaging landmines hit on the way
• Dogfood kicker: the split itself was decomposed and largely executed by the pipeline being split
• Close of the series: recap the map from episode 01, now with every box filled in

Demo ideas

• A forge --help tour mapped to episode numbers, one verb each
• Fresh-machine install of the public forge repo: uv tool install, run a real verb against a scratch repo

Open questions

• Is this one episode or two (front-door architecture vs. open-sourcing story)? If runtime balloons, split at that seam
• Public repo readiness checklist before this episode ships (README, install docs, example configs)