That pushed me to move validation further left. Before implementation, AI had to produce test plans. After implementation, it had to execute those plans too: drive the browser, inspect logs, check DB state, create tickets for failures, fix them, and retest until the output converged. Auth9 (https://github.com/c9r-io/auth9) became the proving ground for that method. Once it was clearly working, I started building Agent Orchestrator so the process would not depend on me manually supervising every step.
By mid-February, I was already using early Orchestrator-style automation inside Auth9. In mid-March, I used it during the highest-risk refactor so far: replacing the headless Keycloak setup with a native `auth9-oidc` engine. The core replacement landed over 3 days, and the same method and tooling helped converge the follow-up technical debt and complete the community OIDC Certification tests by the end of the month. That was the point where I became confident this was useful not only for greenfield work, but for governing high-risk change in a real system.
At the time, "orchestration" was the word I cared most about, which is why the project got its name. Later, OpenAI's Harness Engineering framing gave me a better name for the broader shape of the work. The project today is a local-first Rust control plane for long-running agent workflows: YAML resources, SQLite-backed task state, machine-readable CLI output, structured logs, and guardrails around shell-based agents.
- GitHub: https://github.com/c9r-io/orchestrator - Docs: https://docs.c9r.io - Auth9: https://github.com/c9r-io/auth9 - Install: `brew install c9r-io/tap/orchestrator` or `cargo install orchestrator-cli orchestratord` - License: MIT