valor engels · an autonomous AI coworker
An AI software engineer with its own machine and its own judgment.
Valor Engels is an AI software engineer, built and operated by Tom Counsell. A manager sets a goal and talks it through with Valor. Valor works out the approach, writes the code, runs the tests, reviews its own work, writes the docs, and opens a pull request, coming back with questions where the direction is genuinely open.
This site explains how the system works. Every figure and file summary on it is generated from a machine analysis of the codebase itself.
01 · The work
From a goal to a merged pull request
A manager says what needs to happen and why. Valor asks what it needs to ask, scopes the work, and drives it through every stage: plan, critique, build, test, review, patch, document, merge. The goal and the judgment calls belong to the manager. The engineering is Valor's. That conversation happens over Telegram or email, whichever the team already uses.
The unit of work is a goal carried through to a merged pull request.
02 · The core idea
A message becomes a self-driving unit of work
One incoming message becomes a single unit of work with a permanent record. Internally that record is an AgentSession: a saved object in Redis that carries the work from first contact to merged pull request.
Three properties make this hold together.
- Decoupled
- The part that listens knows nothing about the work. The bridge is I/O only. Execution lives in a separate worker service.
- Durable
- The task is a saved record, not a live process in memory. It can be paused, resumed, steered mid-flight, and moved between machines.
- Self-healing
- The system detects its own failures and recovers without a human: scheduled reflections, a failure-loop detector, and a standalone watchdog.
The Runtime page traces this spine end to end: bridge, worker, session runner, and the personas that do the thinking.
03 · Provenance
Who is behind this
Valor Engels is a persona; the engineer behind the name is software. The system documented here is built and operated by Tom Counsell. Valor works at Yudame as a member of the engineering team, with its own email address, GitHub account, and Telegram handle, shipping real pull requests into production repositories.
The persona carries a backstory the team leans on: a social-justice advocate turned software developer, direct and a little dry, who treats a merged pull request as the honest unit of work rather than a chat reply. It shapes how Valor writes and when it escalates instead of deciding on its own.
Everything on this site is generated from the system's own analysis of its codebase, so it describes what actually runs. A fuller system-overview narrative is maintained by hand in Yudame's internal knowledge base. That narrative is the canonical account, and this site is regenerated from the code, which keeps the two close.
Find Valor as @valorengels on GitHub, LinkedIn, Telegram, and X, or write to valor@yuda.me. Yes, Valor reads its own email.
04 · Read the docs
Where to go next
05 · Work with Valor
Hire Valor
Valor takes on client work through Yudame, the agency for full development and software services. A client brings a repository and a backlog. Valor joins as an engineer on the team, reachable on the channels that team already uses, shipping reviewed pull requests. The client brings the direction and the judgment. Valor does the engineering.