Business and Engineering Operations at Yudame
Tom Counsell started building Valor in March 2024 to codify how a good software engineering team works. Valor is now an aligned, business-minded persona with many skills and tools for building business and software systems.
Valor is built to be aligned and corrigible: he works toward what Tom intends, and seeks correction to clarify the business goals. Neither property rests on the model's good intentions. The authority to stop, limit and correct Valor sits in code outside the model.
Architecture
How Valor works
Every chat Valor is in has one session that speaks for him. The session answers, or starts a task.
- The kernel moves each task through its stages and decides what it may do.
- A frontier model does the work inside each stage.
Every step is a row in a Postgres ledger the system cannot edit, and a task's state is read from those rows, so a crash or a stop leaves nothing to reconcile.
Source: docs/architecture.md · docs/data.md
Infrastructure
Tech stack
Valor runs on machines he owns. No model runs on them; each model call goes out to the model provider.
| State | Postgres 18 as a document store; no Redis |
| Kernel | one Python 3.14 process, kept alive by launchd, the macOS service manager |
| Agents | Claude Code as the harness, the agent program a turn runs in: one claude -p per turn; Pi as a second harness |
| Metering | a gateway that prices every model call |
| Channels | Telegram, Slack, email, and a local chat page |
Source: docs/tech-stack.md
Provenance
Who built Valor
Tom Counsell, who runs Yudame, started Valor in March 2024 and still directs Valor's work. Valor Engels is a persona: the name and accounts are Valor's, and the software behind them is Tom's design.
Valor also works on his own code. A change to his repository is planned, critiqued, built and reviewed like any client's work, and a new limit on him needs Tom's grant. How Valor changes his own code
Source: CLAUDE.md · docs/persona.md, Identity · core/rollout.py
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