metal is a tilde-command system that turns AI into a disciplined shipping machine.
One command triggers a full chain reaction -- plan, build, test, ship, retro -- with
pre-baked conventions for format, folder, repo, versioning, and style. The structure never drifts.
Type ~GO and the system plans the work, sizes it into Fibonacci kanban boards,
builds each item, tests it, ships it, and writes the retro. Every step produces an HTML report.
Every report gets indexed. Every commit gets telemetry. The trail is the proof.
Who It's For
Architects who ship. Solo devs who want structure without overhead. Small teams that need
a workflow engine, not a project management tool. Anyone who's tired of AI assistants that
drift, forget context, and produce work you can't trace.
Why
Because the tools exist now. Claude Code can read a codebase, plan work, write code, run tests,
commit, and push -- but without discipline it produces chaos. metal is the discipline layer.
40 years of shipping distilled into conventions an AI can follow without drifting.
How He Built It
Joey Castillo -- 40+ years as a software architect, code in production with over a billion hours
of combined uptime -- built metal with Claude Code itself. The system eats its own cooking.
Every revision of metal was planned, built, tested, and shipped using tilde commands.
metal is part of AI Pantheon -- Joey's platform for
AI-native tools that respect the craft. No frameworks. No abstractions for hypothetical futures.
Vanilla HTML, batch scripts, shell scripts, pure C. The provisioner runs on any machine with curl.
~chain-reaction
~P ~E /~B ~T/ ~S ~R
Named workflow macros with loops. Commands outside / run once.
Commands inside / / loop until the board is exhausted.
~GO runs the full lifecycle. ~HOTFIX inspects, plans the fix, loops test/fix, ships.
Every tilde command that produces an artifact must pass all 7 items before the command is considered complete. Ship adds 4 more. The gate holds.
✓Code committed -- descriptive message, no uncommitted work ✓Commit hash in telemetry -- backfilled in be/telemetry.json ✓Board updated -- item moved to Done with hash (if applicable) ✓HTML report saved -- correct datetime filename in be/ ✓Index updated -- entry in be/index.html ✓Pushed to remote -- work exists on origin, not just locally ✓No prior work damaged -- Done items untouched unless explicitly targeted
Ship (~s, ~r) adds: chain complete, site in sync, help in sync, revision current.
Definition of Ready -- session pre-flight. Before the first edit:
✓Board state -- read be/board.md. Know what's Done, In Progress, Ready ✓Last telemetry -- was the previous chain completed? Flag unfinished work ✓Source of truth -- respect canonical files. Don't edit non-canonical copies
3 file reads. Takes seconds. Prevents most cross-session work loss.
Strip the OS to its minimum weight. Remove bloatware, dark mode,
privacy lockdown, full power, clean taskbar, fast keyboard.
Not part of the main install -- run separately if you want it.