The Journal / arguments, not announcements
What the system around the model is for.
Founder essays take a position. White papers show the engineering and product constraints behind it. Neither is a changelog in disguise.
Essays / James, Foundry Seven
Candid notes from building the product and choosing its constraints.
- 012 min
From prompt to real product
A convincing generated screen is not yet a product; delivery requires state, behaviour, verification, documentation and an artefact.
- 022 min
Inspectable automation under failure
An automation is trustworthy when its trigger, state, model decision, failure and replay are visible under pressure.
- 032 min
Local models deserve a first-class harness
Local models need capability-aware tools and context, not lower expectations or impossible assignments.
- 042 min
Local-first is a process boundary, not a cache
Local-first means knowing which process holds the work, when it crosses a boundary and who authorised the crossing.
- 052 min
Parallel agents without chaos
Parallelism becomes useful only when ownership, isolation, cost and the merge back into the project are explicit.
- 062 min
Rewind makes delegation recoverable
Permission decides whether an action may begin; rewind changes what happens when an approved action is still wrong.
- 072 min
Safety before autonomy
More capable agents increase the need for visible permission, untrusted-input checks, egress and recovery.
- 082 min
The fork tax
Why a familiar editor shell can become the most expensive architectural decision in an agentic product.
- 093 min
The model is a component, not the product
Better models matter, but the system around them decides whether an answer becomes durable work.
- 106 min
Why Miton is not fully open source
Open code matters. So do paid maintainers, clear ownership and the promise that somebody will still be here to answer for the product.
- 112 min
Writing without surrendering your voice
A writing tool should make judgement easier, preserve provenance and let the author remain recognisable.
White papers
Longer arguments grounded in current architecture and qualified product claims.
Built rather than forked
Why Miton owns its desktop shell, agent runtime and project model instead of inheriting an editor’s centre of gravity.
2 min read
Local-first and bring your own models
A precise account of the local project boundary, hosted model crossings and why local inference participates in the same harness.
2 min read
One project across four specialised workspaces
How Canvas, Writer, Automation and Code stay specialised without fragmenting Chat, Goals and project knowledge.
2 min read
Open-source licensing as a product constraint
Why AGPLv3 shapes Miton’s architecture, public evidence and sustainable workspace business model.
2 min read
Safety before agency
Why permission, injection protection, secret isolation, egress evidence and recovery must compose around every agent action.
2 min read
Token economics is product design
How routing, context shaping, cache stability and visible spend turn model cost into an engineered outcome.
3 min read