Pocketful Dark Factory

A software factory of three coding-agent seats, separated by what each is allowed to do. The coordinator plans and sequences but never writes code and never decides whether work is correct. The implementer builds one work item at a time and hands off a commit with the exact commands and their real output. The verifier writes its acceptance checks from the specification before it sees any code, checks out each handoff into a clean tree, rebuilds it and re-runs it, and holds a veto no other seat can override. The mandates never mention payments. They describe how seats take work, hand it off and refuse it, and a linter derives its banned vocabulary from the specification itself rather than a hand-written list, so a mandate cannot quietly learn the problem. Point them at a different domain and they still describe a working factory. That was the design goal. For the judged run I dispatched one message and said nothing else. The band produced 57 commits over 24 hours, of which 30 are the implementer's and 26 the verifier's. My single commit is the room log. The verifier rejected work repeatedly and the rejections changed the code; one exchange has the implementer reproducing the verifier's own repro against HEAD to show a blocking finding had already been fixed. Stage 1 claims its stage with 147 of 147 checks passing in an isolated container with no outbound network, verified against a fresh clone rather than my working directory. The folder deliberately fails the stage 2 suite, which is how you can tell it holds stage one's answer and not a later one. An open-weights roster of three different model families was measured first and retired on arithmetic: it built all four stages of the practice track and passed every check, then cost $24.53 on a shared counter. That rehearsal also caught three real defects in the factory itself, including commits silently reverting to my own authorship.