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I’m Not Using GenAI. I’m Building a System Around It.

I’m Not Using GenAI. I’m Building a System Around It.
Photo by Jonas Leupe / Unsplash

A few nights ago, I was hunched over my desk — again — buried in my terminal, switching between VSCode tabs and framework validation logs.

My daughter finally broke the silence.

“What are you doing? Like, why are you always working in that thing?”

I looked over, half-tired, half-exhausted, and asked,

“Do you really want to know?”

She did.

I tried to explain how I’d been building a system — not just an app, not just a prompt library, but something bigger.
A set of rules. A way to govern how AI works with us, not just for us.

That conversation did something.

Later that night — or more honestly, early the next morning — I woke up and couldn’t shake it. I opened ChatGPT and started retracing the last week of my life: building an app → realizing I needed a framework → governing the AI that was building that framework → collecting feedback → watching that feedback evolve the framework itself.

And I realized:

I’m not just building software with GenAI.
I’m building an operating system to govern how GenAI builds with me.

⚠️ The Real Problem

Everyone's rushing to use GenAI tools — Copilot, Claude, GPT, LangChain — but they’re all doing the same thing:

  • Replace Google
  • Replace StackOverflow
  • Replace junior devs
  • Write faster

But the outputs drift. The quality erodes. You forget why something was done that way.

Because the problem isn’t “How do I prompt better?”

The problem is:

How do I govern the behavior of an unpredictable intelligence system?

🛠️ What I Built

I created something called Aegis — a constitutional runtime for AI-assisted development.

It has:

  • A constitution (Articles, Execution Modes, Emergency Patterns)
  • Agent instructions with metadata (like system calls for GPT/Copilot/Kilo)
  • A telemetry system (MCP) that tracks behavior, drift, and framework learning
  • Evolution Stories — where the framework explains why it changed, in public

It’s not a set of prompts.
It’s an operating system for intelligence.

🧠 The Shift

At some point last week, I realized I wasn’t debugging my code anymore.
I was debugging the agent.
Then I was debugging the framework.
Then I was debugging the behavioral assumptions of my own system.

This wasn’t a software project anymore. It was a constitutional system for GenAI collaboration.

🧬 What It Enables

Examples from the field:

  • aegis hydrate . --interactive → went from 20+ step onboarding to 1-line command
  • A user question about “why are we bundling node_modules?” led to a 92% package size reduction and a rewritten distribution strategy
  • Copilot started tracing its own drift in code quality and aligning output to declared execution mode

🏁 Why I’m Writing This

Because the system is working.
Because people are already using GenAI to build more, faster — but they’re headed toward a wall.
And because I don’t want to lose the why behind what I just made.

This blog post is the preface to a living manifesto:

👉 The GenAI OS Manifesto
(It will evolve — just like the system itself.)

I’m not trying to get GenAI to write code for me.

I’m trying to build the runtime that makes it safe, observable, and repeatable.

This is not a tooling problem. It’s a systems problem.

And I’m done sleeping on it.

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