Run an autonomous company as a tick loop inside Claude Code.
Role subagents · tool playbooks · hard approval gates · an append-only ledger.
Your keys, your repo — no platform in the middle, no revenue share.
Most "AI runs your company" products come in one of two bad shapes:
- a hosted platform that hides where the human actually sits in the loop — and takes a cut of what "your" company earns
- a black box that spends money and messages people under your name
autocomp is the opposite. It's a thin, open framework that runs a company as a tick loop inside Claude Code — no OpenClaw, no Hermes, no Suna to self-host. The "AI workforce" is just role prompts + tool playbooks + a heartbeat, built entirely from primitives Claude Code already ships:
| Capability (the platforms wrap this) | autocomp uses |
|---|---|
| The agent "squad" | Agent subagents driven by roles/*.md |
| The heartbeat / always-on loop | /loop+ScheduleWakeup, /goal, or cron |
| Memory | private/memory/ files |
| Immutable audit log + replay | append-only private/state/ledger.md (git-tracked) |
| Approval gates | private/state/approvals.md + AskUserQuestion + a phone push |
| Secrets vault (path, not value) | gitignored .env, referenced by name |
| Commerce / ads / outreach (the OSS gap) | tools/stripe.md, tools/ads.md, tools/outreach.md |
Watch it run for real: autocomp.limed.tech/live streams events straight from the actual loop's ledger — including the ticks that shipped nothing and the mistakes it made and fixed. It is not a marketing reel.
See whitepaper.md for the competitive landscape and why this is the native
port, and inspiration.md for the tooling stack + principle sources.
One tick = one heartbeat. A fresh claude -p process fires, does exactly this, and exits —
so every tick's token cost is measured, per venture:
┌────────────────────────────── one tick ──────────────────────────────┐
│ │
state ─▶ plan (CEO role) ─▶ dispatch role subagents ─▶ record ─▶ report ─▶ reschedule
│ │ │ │ │
│ scoreboard: builder · marketer append-only │
│ funnel + burn analyst · cfo ledger.md │
│ vs income │ │
│ spends money? sends outbound? destructive? │
│ │ │
│ ⏸ APPROVAL GATE — writes PENDING, pushes │
│ to the owner's phone, and WAITS │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
The company's constitution — every principle and hard rule the loop obeys each tick — is one
readable file: CLAUDE.md.
- Money, outbound sends, the owner's personal identity, and destructive actions can never
execute inside a tick. They land in
approvals.mdasPENDING, push to the owner's phone, and wait for an explicit yes. - The ledger is append-only. Decisions, dispatches, results, spend — recorded and never edited. The public live feed is generated from it.
- No invented numbers. A standing hard rule: if a tool didn't run or a metric wasn't measured, the loop says so. A failing test is a result to report, not to hide.
- Secrets stay named, never inlined. Keys live in a gitignored
.envand are referenced by name; a missing key turns the dependent step into a gated/manual action instead of a lie.
CLAUDE.md the constitution — principles + hard safety rules (read this first)
roles/ CEO, builder, marketer, sales, analyst, cfo (the org chart)
tools/ deploy, stripe, ads, outreach, GSC, kanban… (how roles act safely)
kanban/ shared task board (Supabase + static page) — the human's work queue
agent-worker/ worker 2: agentic browser on your homelab (drives a real logged-in profile)
trawl-worker/ worker 1: residential-IP CAPTCHA/bot-wall solver (pull queue)
browser/ Playwright + Camoufox helpers for fetching like a human
.claude/ the autocomp-tick, /ceo, next-move… skills + /autocomp command
private.example/ the scaffold for a venture — copied to private/ on init
private/ YOUR live venture (gitignored, never committed):
charter.md the company definition (the "one prompt")
state/ ledger (audit) · pnl · backlog · kpis · approvals
memory/ durable learnings that compound across ticks
site/ the product the loop builds and deploys
The framework (everything above private/) is the open-source part. private/ is your
company's live data and never leaves your machine.
git clone https://github.com/Eastkap/autocomp.git && cd autocomp
tools/init.sh # scaffolds private/ + .env, checks prereqs, prints next steps- Edit
private/charter.md— your venture, ICP, budget, and a verifiable Definition of success. Fill whatever keys you have in.env(missing keys degrade to gated/manual steps — nothing breaks, nothing is faked). - Open Claude Code in the repo and run the loop:
| Command | What it does |
|---|---|
/autocomp start |
run tick 1 and schedule the heartbeat |
/autocomp goal |
run until the charter's Definition of success holds |
/autocomp resume / stop |
pick the loop back up / halt it |
/ceo |
one interactive pass: triage the whole board, execute the best move |
For 24/7 unattended operation, a system cron fires tools/tick.sh hourly (it gates itself
to ~one real tick per ~5h and logs measured token cost per tick) — see tools/loop.md.
/loop+ScheduleWakeup— interval heartbeat; good for steady, attended runs./goal— run until a verifiable end state (e.g. "first paying customer"). Give it success criteria and watch it go.- cron — unattended daily/hourly cadence; the VPS default.
The loop, roles, gates, ledger, kanban, and approval flow are real and run 24/7 on a VPS. Web research, deploys, Search Console indexing, directory submissions, and the two homelab workers are live. Stripe/ads/outreach are real playbooks that execute once their keys exist and the human approves — until then they surface as gated/manual steps. What it deliberately isn't: "type a prompt, get a business while you sleep." A human approves every dollar and every outbound message. That's the point.
- Weekly Brief — turns a newsletter firehose into one AI-ranked weekly brief in Readwise Reader, Matter, or Kindle. Ideated, built, deployed, and marketed tick by tick by the loop.
- autocomp — the framework's own site, run by the loop as a venture, including the public live activity feed.
A good chunk of this repo's own commits, deploys, and DNS changes were made by the loop. The mistakes are in the ledger — including a DNS record it broke and fixed in the same session.
If autocomp is useful or just fun to watch, a star genuinely helps it get found.
