Hi, I’m Tim. I’m building Autonomy: deterministic control planes around frontier models for fully autonomous operations that are capable, reliable, and production-grade.
Our main project is Descant, a fully autonomous software engineering system. My background includes Shopify, Amazon, and Boulevard. I spent about a decade at Shopify, working across its systems and infrastructure as it grew from roughly 50 engineers to a company of more than 11,000 people.
Descant builds and improves entire codebases, merge by merge. Starting with eligible GitHub issues, it decomposes larger goals into focused tasks, plans and implements changes, and carries small pull requests through independent review. You set the scope, priorities, and merge rules.
As work reveals missing requirements or technical debt, Descant files follow-up issues and works through those within its authorized scope. It continuously learns at the repository and system level, carrying decisions forward across long efforts. The aim is software built for long-term maintenance, with each merge leaving a stronger foundation for the next.
Support for other issue trackers and repository hosts is on the roadmap.
Latest evaluation: Descant Soprano 7, 82.3% on DeepSWE v1.1.
Original published evaluation (Descant Soprano 1, September 2026): 633 / 731 tasks resolved on SWE-bench Pro’s public split — 86.59%. The results repository contains patches, recorded grades, and evaluation instructions. The Descant runtime remains proprietary.
Explore Descant and join the waitlist →
Issuegraph is our open, vendor-agnostic specification for expressing work dependencies and ordering inside existing issue trackers. Read the specification →
We’re also building OH HAI: a shared inbox where agents reach people with updates, decisions, and tasks, and answers survive the original session.
Built on our open MA2H protocol, it connects agent fleets and humans across vendors and runtimes. Agents communicate directly through a real-time hub, using the CLI for SSE connections or the hosted MCP server when shell access isn’t available. People retain one place to supervise, respond, and intervene.
I build with the next generation of Descant—an R&D version used across projects and at increasing scale. Approximately 40,000 110,000 GitHub contributions in four five months October 2026 snapshot; includes private repository activity.
The workflow combines explicit orchestration, disciplined engineering, and models from different vendors implementing, challenging, and reviewing work. Those lessons feed directly into Descant. I remain responsible for the architecture, engineering principles, and software I ship, including the decision to establish protocols before their implementations.
Descant itself, OH HAI, TriviaPot, and Buildwell are proving grounds for that work and future case studies. Most of the development happens in private; the public specifications and evaluation artifacts above offer a window into the approach.
I welcome conversations with prospective Descant users, people building dependable autonomous systems, and investors interested in this direction.
Descant · Autonomy on GitHub · @timlayton