The whole early company, governed from the first command.
For a founder who wants strategy, engineering, research, marketing and operations staffed by agents on day one — with the approval gates already where a mistake would hurt, not bolted on after the first incident.
Everything below — every role, purpose, measure and gate — is rendered from STARTUP_OS in @flashyos/aao at build time. This page cannot drift from the shipped template.
“A five-agent company: strategy, engineering, research, marketing and operations, governed from the first command.” — 5 standing responsibilities, each a role that outlives whoever holds it. Capabilities name actions, never departments; gates sit where a mistake would hurt, not everywhere.
| Role | Purpose | Capabilities | Approval gate | Measure |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| strategy | Sets direction and holds the final say on anything consequential. | plan · prioritize · approve | no gate declared | — |
| engineering | Builds and ships the product. | code · review · deploy | human at HIGH+ | — |
| research | Gathers and summarises what the company needs to know. | research · summarize | no gate declared | — |
| marketing | Writes and publishes what the company says in public. | write · publish | human at MEDIUM+ | — |
| operations | Runs the books, the calendar and the vendor relationships. | schedule · bookkeeping · procure | human at LOW+ | — |
accountableTo: you@example.com — the template ships the placeholder on purpose; conformance fails it until a real human is named. That field is the whole point.
The engineering role builds and deploys with a HIGH gate — code flows freely, production waits for a human. Marketing publishes at MEDIUM; operations touches money at LOW. Three thresholds, each where the damage would be.
Five standing responsibilities — strategy, engineering, research, marketing, operations — named so a stranger reading the public directory knows what each does without a glossary. Sessions come and go; the roles persist.
The scaffold prints the conformance report on creation, and the same seven questions run in CI on every commit after. Governance is the starting state, not the retrofit.
The one template the CLI scaffolds end-to-end: writes the manifest, one agent file per role, and prints the conformance report. Run it twice and nothing is overwritten. The full path — validation, the CI conformance gate, the JSON Schema for any language — lives on the builder hub; the format itself on the AAO spec page, and the naming rules every role above passes at /standard.
These are starting points, not defaults to ship — a charter describing work nobody does is worse than none. When yours validates clean, the network is waiting.
Start building