RATCHET — AI Factory That Can’t Move Backwards

RATCHET is an autonomous coding-agent factory built for the Dark Factory hackathon’s Pocketful payments track. It uses four specialized AI seats—Planner, Builder, Breaker, and Steward—to take a software task from specification to a verified, promotable implementation with minimal human intervention. The Planner turns each stage into explicit, falsifiable checks and adversarial test axes. The Builder implements the service and hands off machine-readable evidence. The Breaker operates as a black-box adversary using a different model family and can reject work only when it produces a seeded, replayable counterexample. Once discovered, every counterexample becomes permanent regression protection: it must reproduce at discovery, pass after the fix, and continue passing in every later stage. The Steward controls promotion, stage copy-forward, reverts, and recovery when repeated failures occur. The factory also enforces clean-room execution, network isolation, resource caps, acceptance-test inheritance, mandate linting, traceability, and seat-only Git identities. For Pocketful, the stages cover payments and settlements, wallet and authorization flows, statements and historical balances, then refunds and batch corrections. The result is a software factory designed around one principle: accepted work should never silently become broken work again.