AME workflow

One account, one machine, one session

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The rule

One Claude account. One machine at a time. That machine is the Beelink at the cabin. Every other machine is shut down for code work while it is running.

The point is transparency, not restriction. One instance means every session is visible to both people, all the time — from the machine or from a phone. Nothing happens that the other cannot see. No guessing what changed, no finding out afterwards, and no two people editing the same file blind. That is the whole reason for doing it this way.

Accounts

AccountAccess
walhus@gmail.comPrimary. The $200/month subscription. All code work runs on this.
wholetechtexas@gmail.comOccasional. Allowed, never at the same time as the primary.
Any other accountNot permitted to touch the codebase, the droplet, or any site.

Multiple tabs on that one session are fine and expected — one for AME development, one for the Tim material, switching as needed. The point is a single session both people can see, not a single task.

What this replaces

Working on separate accounts, sessions cannot see each other. Each reads a file, changes part of it, writes it back — and whoever writes last silently erases the other. No error, no warning.

The confusion is built in, not careless. Overnight on the 22nd, content was being tested through the engine on a test domain and the engine's own code was being edited — both were true at once. "I'm only testing" and "code changed" are easy to hold at the same time without either person misleading anyone. That is exactly why the rule has to be explicit rather than assumed.

Turn-taking

1
Published hours. There are set hours when each person has the machine. Asking each time, or guessing that the middle of the night is safest, is not a system — it is how someone ends up working at 3am to stay out of the way.
2
Handover, not eviction. Nobody is asked to drop work mid-flight. The person finishing says what state things are in and what was about to happen next; the person starting reads that before touching anything.
3
Say when you're in and when you're out. One line each way. Two people who know the other is in the building behave completely differently from two people who think they're alone.

One place for notes, one channel

Work notes, test findings, and anything being prepared for Tim live in the session on that machine, where both people can read and comment. Not in a private notepad, not in one person's head.

The channel is direct messages in Gmail. Work coordination goes there and nowhere else — who has the machine, what state it is in, what is about to break.

Emails across several accounts, text messages, chat windows and notepads cannot be kept consistent by anyone, and trying to is the root cause of every mix-up so far. One channel, so there is one place to look.

Testing is not restricted

Using the engine through its interface — onboarding, drafting, content revisions, approving, breaking things on purpose — is normal work and is not limited by this rule. royallswindmill.com is the test domain for feature work. The rule is about editing the system, not using it.

The safety net

/opt/autoengine is under version control and commits itself every fifteen minutes, so a collision costs a quarter of an hour and is visible, instead of costing a night and being unprovable.

git -C /opt/autoengine log --oneline      # what changed, and when
git -C /opt/autoengine diff               # what has changed since the last save
git -C /opt/autoengine checkout -- FILE   # put a file back
Do not restart the engine without checking first. A restart kills every request in flight. The person restarting sees nothing. The person working sees the software fail for no reason and has no way to know why. Check whether a site was touched in the last few minutes, and wait if it was.