Patterns / Aegis
open pattern
Aegis
A six-advisor council that runs board-quality reasoning across legal, finance, ops, product, market, and risk before a single sentence reaches the founder.
This is the studio's open pattern. The scenario below is a composite, drawn to scale from real desks; the names, numbers, and industry are invented. The architecture is the part to trust, and it is published here in full.
The bottleneck
Imagine a founder of a growing vertical SaaS company who is the deciding voice on every weekly question that matters: a renewal renegotiation, a hiring escalation, a feature trade-off, a press response. Six departments queue their hardest questions at her desk on Monday. She answers half of them with judgment that took fifteen years to develop, and the other half slip another week.
She does not want an assistant. She wants the part of her that says no to bad ideas available to her team on Wednesday afternoon, while she is in board prep. Not a system that makes the call: a system that writes the memo she would have written, so that most of the time her team already knows what to do.
The shape
Aegis is a council of six specialised advisors, each absorbed from a senior person inside the company: the General Counsel, the CFO, the COO, the Head of Product, the Head of Market, and an external risk advisor. Each advisor is a memory-rich agent that reads a question, drafts an opinion, and submits it to a Chamber. The Chamber is a deliberation pattern, not an aggregator: it reads dissents seriously, escalates disagreement, and returns a single memo in the founder's prose voice.
The six advisors
Each advisor is its own agent with its own memory, absorbed from its senior person through slow interviews: days in the room, not a questionnaire. The advisors are built sequentially, one senior person at a time.
01
Counsel, from the General Counsel
Reads contracts, reads disputes, reads the founder's tolerance for noise. Trained on years of internal memos and a private set of redlines. Refuses to give a confidence number; gives a margin of error and a precedent.
02
Finance, from the CFO
Looks at revenue impact, cash impact, and headcount cost on every question, in that order. Quotes a number, then quotes the assumption it's standing on.
03
Ops, from the COO
The dissenting voice. Trained to ask “what breaks on Tuesday?” before agreeing to anything elegant. Has the longest memory of past decisions and the consequences that arrived three quarters later.
04
Product, from the Head of Product
Carries the customer voice into every decision. Reads support tickets weekly and writes a small report nobody asked for. The only advisor allowed to invoke a user by name.
05
Market, from the Head of Market
Sees the competitive landscape and the press cycle. Reads industry letters and a curated set of analyst notes. The only advisor that may answer with a question.
06
Risk, the external advisor
Quiet by default. Speaks when the Chamber detects unusual exposure: regulatory, reputational, existential. Carries a one-page memo template that ends with a single recommendation.
Memory model
Aegis uses the studio's six-layer memory pattern. Each layer is a separate store with a separate retention policy, listed here from fastest-changing to slowest, and each is named for its room in this building. The full argument for the model is in Six layers of memory.
l0 · session: the current question, the documents attached, the explicit context. Cleared at the end of every Chamber convening.l1 · thread: the seven-day rolling memory of related questions and the memos the Chamber produced. Compacted nightly.l2 · advisor: each advisor's own long memory: redlines, precedents, support tickets, analyst notes. Read-only from the Chamber's perspective.l3 · chamber: the deliberation history. Every dissent, every refused premise, every rationale that made it into the final memo. The most-watched store in the system.l4 · founder: the founder's voice corpus: emails, memos, board scripts, voice notes. The scribe reads this layer to translate the Chamber's verdict into her prose.l5 · seed: the founding documents. Vision memo, principles, the three things the founder has said she will never do.
The seed layer is the smallest and the most consulted. The Chamber reads it before every convening. The founder edits it in person, once a quarter, in a single sitting.
Deliberation pattern
A question arrives at the threshold. The threshold determines which advisors are required; not all six attend every Chamber. The required advisors each draft an opinion in parallel, blind to one another, with full access to layers l0 through l2. The Chamber receives the drafts, reads dissents first, and escalates if the dissents conflict with the seed layer.
The verdict is a structured object with a recommendation, the dissents that survived, and the rationale the scribe will use. The scribe writes the memo. The memo is delivered in the founder's voice with a footnote naming which advisors deliberated and which dissented.
Deployment
Aegis is built to run as a private service on the owner's stack. Questions arrive from Slack, from a thin web form, or by an executive forwarding an email. Memos are designed to return in minutes for routine questions and to take longer when the risk advisor is required.
The system has a strict guardrail: it does not respond to questions tagged decision. It only writes the memo a decision would be based on. The founder makes the call.
Handoff
The pattern is designed to be handed over, and the handoff is designed before the advisors are. By the end of a build, the owner's engineers hold the advisors, the Chamber, and the scribe; an operations lead owns the seed layer and runs the quarterly editing session with the founder. An eval suite guards every future edit: if the suite passes, the change ships.
Why we work this way is its own essay: The handoff is the deliverable.
This is the open pattern. The other systems in the pattern library are studies built on variants of it.