Backstory
Born from a project that demanded more than the tools could give.
A real program. Real stakes. Too many tools.
The Protein Industries Canada (PIC) consortium brings together industry, academia, and government to advance plant-protein innovation. The programs are ambitious — multi-year, multi-organisation, with quarterly claims, steering-committee packs, mandated publication-review windows, and a funder who expects precise, templated reporting on exact dates.
Cross-organisation communication, collaboration, and reporting demands were extraordinarily high, compressed into aggressive timelines. Every partner had their own tools, their own workflows, their own cadences.
The information existed. It was everywhere.
Slack threads, email chains, shared drives, Jira boards, Confluence pages, verbal hallway decisions. The same fact lived in six formats.
Assembling the weekly status, the SC pack, the quarterly claim — the same story rebuilt from scratch, for every audience, every cycle.
The project lead spent as much time assembling reports as doing the actual work. The reporting load nearly outweighed the program itself.
From reconstruction to rendering.
project-state was the answer.
A single substrate — plain files on a shared drive — where facts are recorded once, by whoever is closest to them. Skills that generate every report from that state, on cadence, in the voice each stakeholder expects.
Compliance packs encode each funder's rules in swappable YAML, not hardcoded logic. The same engine that writes your weekly status also assembles the quarterly claim, the steering-committee pack, and the publication-review dossier.
The proof is live.
The PIC compliance pack is in production today — driving real quarterly claims, steering-committee lifecycles, and a mandated 30/14-day publication-review window. It's the proof that the model works: the reporting became a byproduct of the work, not a second job.
How we got here.
Multi-organisation plant-protein program launches. Reporting demands immediately exceed tooling capacity.
Plain-file architecture. Milestones, risks, decisions as YAML. The activity log as append-only NDJSON.
35 skills — status reporter, funder reporting, review meetings, document curator, harvester. All stateless verbs reading one substrate.
First compliance pack in production. Quarterly claims, SC lifecycle, 30/14-day publication-review window — all automated.
Desktop operator UI, local-first + GitHub hub sync, and the pilot programme opens to external teams.
What we believe.
You do the work; the reports fall out of it.
When a report is wrong, fix the state — not the report.
Every artifact stops at human review. Nothing leaves without approval.
Your compliance regime is YAML, not hardcoded logic.
Plain files, git history, runs offline. No database, no SaaS lock-in, ever.
0600 files on your machine. Not a keychain. Not a cloud.
We build operational software for programs that outlast any single team — local-first, own-your-data, no lock-in. project-state is our first product.
Founder & lead. Designed and built project-state end to end — the substrate, the 35 skills, the compliance packs, and the operator app — while running the PIC consortium program that demanded it.
Built under pressure. Ready for yours.
If your program has more stakeholders than hours, we should talk.