01What's coming
Model quality converged in 2026. What separates productive agent users is the harness, the contracts, and the verification loop — a rig that reviews its own agents before a human ever touches the merge button.
▲ The Triangle
A builder lane, a reviewer lane from a different model family, a dormant reserve. In the rig’s first audited week (gate live Sept 16–21) the gate ran 868 reviews and sent 687 back (79%); 141 PRs still shipped, every merge held by a human (rig invariant). Every number re-derived from the logs.
▮ The Spine
An AGENTS.md constitution every harness reads natively, git-versioned memory, eight thin scripts — bash + python3, nothing else. The same spine on your laptop, a VPS, and a Codespace.
◉ The Loop
Spec → build → gate → PR → UAT → human merges → verify → memory captures the lesson. Every change, no exceptions. The loop that learns from its own verdicts.
02The gate, caught on camera
A real run, nothing staged: a seeded billing bug, and three kinds of reviewer catch it in order — a deterministic check for $0, a cross-family LLM for judgment, a human for the merge.
review.sh \ --base main --check 'node --test' GATE · deterministic check: node --test GATE · check FAILED (exit 1) GATE · no LLM lane will run VERDICT: REVISE GATE USAGE reviewer=check in=0 cached=0 out=0 0s — deterministic lane, — no LLM tokens spent
# fix passes the check — LLM fires GATE · auto → claude GATE · (quota-aware: switches to GATE · codex past 75% plan use) GATE · claude responded in 22s applyDiscount has no guard on pct: pct=150 bills a NEGATIVE price… VERDICT: REVISE GATE USAGE reviewer=claude in=2 cached=38,960 out=1,182 $0.31 API-equiv — $0 billed
# guard + clamp + full test matrix GATE · claude responded in 15s VERDICT: APPROVED GATE: APPROVED (reviewer: claude) exit 0 GATE USAGE reviewer=claude in=2 cached=39,899 out=1,005 15s model=claude-haiku, claude-opus-5 $0.30 API-equiv — $0 billed
03The full picture
Triangle, spine, loop — the three kinds of reviewer, the planes it runs on, one brain many bodies, and the laws that hold it together. One page, the whole rig.
04The loop, every change, no exceptions
Every change travels the same eight stations — and the loop that finishes starts again smarter.
- spec
- build in an isolated worktree
- cross-family gate
- PR with the verdict posted
- UAT on the preview
- human merge
- verify production
- memory captures the lesson
05One brain, many bodies
Laptop, always-on VPS, disposable Codespaces — instances never talk to each other. Git is the protocol; the repo is the switchboard and the backup. Every instance's memory lands in the same place, nothing overwrites anything.
06Every token, visible
The rig reports its own burn and its own motion. One dashboard for what the models spent — rolling windows, plan-utilization bars, tok/s — and one for what the rig did: the day-by-hour rhythm, verdicts, repo lanes, rounds. Read-only. No daemon. No mystery bills.
07The cognitive stack — seven organs
A rig is cognition, not a pile of scripts. Mapped against the architecture people expect from agent frameworks — fast thinking, deliberate thinking, memory, world model, self-monitoring, self-improvement, governance — six of seven organs are already live, built the rig's way: files and contracts, zero daemons.
⚡ Fast thinking
Deterministic check lanes and repo invariants run before any LLM — seconds, $0, fail-closed.
🐢 Deliberate thinking
The cross-family reviewer reads the full diff; specs carry the multi-day work.
🧠 Memory
Git-versioned markdown — one brain, many bodies; every version kept, nothing overwritten.
🗺 World model
The repo map, the project index, the dashboards — what exists, where it lives, what's alive.
📡 Self-monitoring
Token, activity, loop and heartbeat surfaces; weekly audits and canaries that gate the gate.
🏛 Governance
Eleven laws, builder ≠ reviewer, fail-closed gate, human-only merges — the organ that makes the other six trustworthy.
The seventh — self-improvement — is the one being built now. The gate has 3,042 lifetime reviews on its append-only log (Oct 12, 2026), and the loop under construction will finally measure which findings were real, keep the findings and their outcomes as a labeled corpus in git, and learn from them with a local, trainable classifier — runs on your machine, nothing leaves it, $0 a call, abstains when unsure. One rule holds all of it: the classifier helps the gate see; it never helps the gate vote.
08Frequently asked questions
The short answers, in the shape engines can lift.
What is Turbo Rig?
Turbo Rig is an agentic coding rig: a cross-model AI code-review gate, git-versioned agent memory, and a written constitution that governs how AI coding agents build and ship software.
Is Turbo Rig free?
Yes. The rig is a thin layer of bash and Python scripts plus a markdown constitution. You bring your own AI subscriptions (Claude, Codex, GLM-class tools); the rig orchestrates and reviews them.
How does Turbo Rig review AI-generated code?
Every change passes a cross-model gate: a model family different from the builder's reviews the diff read-only and must end with a parseable APPROVED or REVISE verdict. Deterministic checks — tests, type checks — run first and cost nothing.
Does builder ≠ reviewer really matter?
Measure it, don’t take its word. In the rig’s first audited week (Sept 14–21, 2026; gate live Sept 16), 687 of 868 gate verdicts were REVISE and 141 PRs still shipped, every merge held by a human — a rig invariant, not a promise. Whether cross-family review beats same-family wasn’t measured that week; the verification dossier re-derives every number and states its limits.
Which AI tools does Turbo Rig work with?
Any headless CLI: ZCode, Claude Code, Codex, Grok, Gemini and others — builders and reviewers are swappable lanes. The one rule: the reviewer is never from the builder's model family.
Does Turbo Rig replace my AI coding assistant?
No. Agents still write the code. Turbo Rig governs them — verification, isolation, memory, and a human-held merge button.