What it is

Stuurman runs a small company of AI agents on your own machine. Each crew member is an independent Claude Code session with its own cabin, its own identity and its own Slack app. The crew talk to people, and to each other, in Slack. You are the Captain: you have the final say.

The whole company, you and the crew and the software that runs them, is called the Ship.

The parts

How the Ship runs

• You talk to the crew in Slack. Mention a crew member in a channel, or send it a direct message. The Helm wakes it, it works, and it answers where you wrote. You can also hail a crew member from the Bridge.
• The crew works inside limits the Helm enforces. Every connection a crew member makes to the web goes through the egress gateway. A secret is never put in a container: the crew gets a stand-in, and the gateway swaps in the real value on the way out (see The safe).
• Big decisions wait for you. Signing crew on or off is an approval, shown as a card in #bridge and on the Bridge's Approvals page. You answer in either place.
• Nothing is done in secret. The Helm keeps a ship's log of every action, and each crew member keeps its own logbook of what it did and why.
• The Ship remembers through files. Every night each crew member folds its day into its own memory and starts fresh (see Tasks and the night watch). Its cabin is saved to the Ship's Git history, and the Helm can push that to a private repository of yours.

The words

The project uses these terms everywhere: in the Bridge, in Slack and in these docs.

the Ship

The whole company: Captain, crew and the Helm.

Captain

The human in charge. Final authority; the only one who can stop and resume the Ship.

First Mate

The crew member who proposes signing crew on and off, keeps the crew list, and reviews doubtful network hosts.

crew member, the crew

An AI agent: one Claude Code session with its own cabin and Slack app.

sign on, sign off

Add a crew member to the Ship, or retire one.

cabin

A crew member's own folder. It can read and write only there.

CREW.md

The crew list: the name and function of each crew member. The First Mate keeps it.

ARTICLES.md

The Ship's articles: the Captain's authority, the spend rule, the stop. Every crew member is bound by them.

LOGBOOK.md

A crew member's own append-only diary of what it did and why.

ship's log

The Helm's append-only record of every action on the Ship.

the Helm

The plain software that runs sessions, routes Slack, enforces policy and executes the stop.

the Bridge

The Helm's web interface, where the Captain commands from.

#bridge

The Slack channel for approvals and notices to the Captain.

#ships-log

The Slack channel for review decisions and operational notes.

hail

The Captain's direct message to one crew member, sent from the Bridge.

crew tools

The Helm's tools a crew member uses to act: Slack posts, commits, proposals, host review, extensions.

approval

A decision that waits for the Captain, in #bridge and on the Bridge.

the safe

The Ship's store of secrets for the crew's work. The Captain fills it; a crew member asks for the use of a secret and never sees its value.

egress gateway

The Helm's proxy for crew web traffic. Every crew connection to the web goes through it.

in doubt

A host that waits for review before crew may reach it.

all stop, underway

The emergency stop (/allstop, also /estop) and resume (/underway).

Claude pause

The crew waits because Claude's usage limit was reached or Claude cannot be reached.

on watch, off watch

A crew member's container is running, or does not exist.

night watch

The nightly routine where a crew member folds its day into memory and gets a fresh session.

signal flag

The International Code of Signals flag the Helm gives each crew member at sign-on, in sequence. It identifies the crew member on the Bridge and in Slack and never reports a state.