Custos Designs

The chain of custody

Four stations, in order, and each one leaves something behind. The paper trail is not a report we write about the work afterwards. It is the work.

1. Station one

   Intake, under seal

   Before a single substantive question, both sides sign a mutual non-disclosure agreement. Then you are interviewed one question at a time, in a deliberate order. Where an answer is too vague to build from, you are asked a better question there and then, rather than in a follow-up long after it would have helped.

   • The exact agreement text you accepted, fingerprinted and stored with the moment you accepted it
   • Your answers, in your own words, encrypted before they are written down
   • What you could not decide, recorded as undecided rather than quietly assumed

   What you watch while you answer

   The record4/34

   1. venture.nameHarbour Books
   2. venture.one_linerA members-only ordering desk for independent bookshops.
   3. venture.backendNo, there is nothing running yet
   4. users.rolesrecorded as undecided

2. Station two

   The packet, sealed

   Your answers compile into one document: what the thing is, who uses it, every screen and every state it can be in, the data behind it, the permission rules, and what finished means, stated precisely enough to be argued with. Sealing it fingerprints the exact text. After that, a change is a re-issue with its own record, never a quiet edit.

   • A sealed document with its own identifier and its own digest
   • Yours to keep, and yours to take elsewhere, whatever you decide next
   • Nothing is built until you have read it and approved it

   The seal, as it appears on a sealed intake

   Sealed

   4045956414442c36449c49dd684dc8f883ffcf65f88dd1139f955be173628ac9

   sha256 of the specimen record, computed as this page rendered

3. Station three

   The build, witnessed

   The build runs under a chain of standing checks. They read the work on every change and refuse the ones that break a rule this studio has already paid to learn: a permission gap, an error swallowed in silence, a promise in the copy nobody approved.

   • Every change runs the whole chain before it is allowed to land
   • A red check stops the change, which is the only moment stopping it is cheap
   • The same chain runs on this website, and the sentence you are reading passed it

   Checks that ran before this page shipped

   • migration-disciplinepass
   • rls-coveragepass
   • privileged-column-guardspass
   • silent-catchpass
   • retired-vocabularypass
   • data-semanticspass
   • env-paritypass
   • seam-registrypass
4. Station four

   Handover, with the trail

   At the end you have the product itself, the sealed document it was built from, and the record of what was decided and when. Nothing about this studio is required to keep it running, and nothing about it is a secret from you.

   • The product, deployed and running, on every platform it was built for
   • The sealed specification, and every decision on the record
   • The source, and the chain of checks that keeps it honest afterwards

   What changes hands

   - the product, running, on its own hosting
   - the sealed specification, with its digest
   - the record of every answer, including the undecided ones
   - the source, and the chain of checks that reads it
   - the accounts and the keys, in your name

The reversal

You see it running before you commit, and the packet is yours either way.

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