Announcing GLITCHLAB: The Local-First Agentic Engineering Engine

The Bottleneck is Execution

Engineering teams face a structural bottleneck: the gap between knowing what to build and having the hands on keyboards to build it. This gap is especially acute for small teams and solo operators managing complex codebases.

While current AI coding tools offer autocomplete or chat assistance, they often lack the governance, structured output, and predictable boundaries required for production-ready work.

GLITCHLAB is our solution. It is not a copilot. It is not autocomplete. It is a local-first, multi-agent development engine that turns structured task definitions into tested, reviewed, and documented pull requests.

How GLITCHLAB Works: The Deterministic Pipeline

GLITCHLAB operates a deterministic orchestration pipeline under strict human supervision. You define the task; the system handles the mechanical execution.

The pipeline follows a rigorous 8-step sequence:

1. Index: Scans the repository to map structure and detect languages.
2. Plan: A planner agent breaks tasks into precise steps and proposes a test strategy.
3. Implement: An implementer agent writes code and tests inside an isolated git worktree.
4. Test & Debug: The system runs your test suite and uses a debugger agent to fix failures automatically.
5. Security Review: A dedicated security agent scans for dangerous patterns and hardcoded credentials.
6. Release Assessment: Determines version impact and writes changelog entries.
7. Document: Design decisions are captured as Architecture Decision Records (ADRs).
8. Deliver: Commits, pushes, and opens a structured pull request for your final review.

Integrated Context with Prelude

A major hurdle for agentic systems is "project amnesia." To solve this at a low cost, GLITCHLAB deeply integrates with Prelude.

Prelude serves as our low-cost context management solution, providing machine-readable summaries of your stack, architecture, and constraints. By ingesting this context, GLITCHLAB agents understand the project before they plan, ensuring they reference real paths and follow established patterns instead of hallucinating them. This feedback loop is closed by Archivist Nova, a GLITCHLAB agent that writes design decisions back into Prelude-compatible records for future runs.

Safety and Provenance with Zephyr

While GLITCHLAB is built to be "Safe by Default" through human intervention gates and tool allowlisting, high-stakes environments require even greater certainty.

For these use cases, GLITCHLAB can be upgraded with the Zephyr governance layer. In this configuration, every meaningful event in the development pipeline—from planning and file edits to test results and PR creation—becomes a signed, cryptographically attested record. This transforms agentic development from a "black box" into verifiable autonomous engineering.

Build Weird. Ship Clean.

GLITCHLAB does not replace your judgment. It replaces the mechanical work of writing boilerplate, running test suites, and documenting architecture. It allows you to stay in "design thinking" mode while the engine handles the keyboard work.

Get Started:

• Explore the Engine: GitHub - adjective-rob/glitchlab
• Design Your Workflow: Request an Implementation Consultation

GLITCHLAB is a leverage tool, not a startup. It compounds capability locally, under your governance, at token cost.