The crew and its ranks

What it is

Ask one AI session to write the spec, design the page, build it, test it and review it, and it grades its own homework. It also forgets the spec by the time it reaches the tests.

ShipItFam gives each of those jobs to a different rank. A mission, which is one job you hand to the crew, is split into steps, and each step is a short fresh run with one task and one rank. The product owner reads your request. The architect plans it. QA checks the result. No single AI session plays every part.

A mission uses only the ranks its plan names.

The built-in ranks

• Product owner. Turns your sentence into a spec: the goal, the scope, what is out of scope and the acceptance criteria.
• Architect. Writes the plan and splits it into steps.
• Fammy. The crew's parrot. Fammy critiques every plan and never rewrites it.
• Designer. Draws a wireframe first, then builds a prototype with made-up data.
• Front-end and Back-end. Build the screens and the logic behind them.
• DevOps. Sets up how the project builds and runs.
• QA. Maps each acceptance criterion to a test and gives a verdict: pass, fail or blocked.
• Reviewer. Writes a structured review of large or risky changes, then an adversarial one.
• Reporter. Reads the code and writes a report. It changes nothing.

The planning page shows how these ranks line up on a real mission.

Brief a rank

Every rank comes with instructions written by us. In a project's settings you can edit them for that project, so Maria can tell her Designer that the bakery site always uses warm colours and large photos. A "Sync to latest" button restores our version if you want it back.

There is also one free-text field for the whole project. Whatever you write there is read by every rank, which suits things like "our customers are mostly local and many are over sixty".

Add your own rank

If the crew is missing a role, you add it. A rank has a name, a description, and up to four sections: instructions, goals, skills and thought process. Maria could add a Copywriter who knows the bakery's tone of voice.

Your ranks live in your account and you switch them on or off for each project. Once a rank is on, the architect can assign steps to it.

The rank directory

The directory holds 10 ready-made skills from open-source collections. A skill is a written how-to a rank follows. A person checked each one: the licence was read, an automated analysis was run, and the skill is pinned to an exact version.

You can also import a skill from a GitHub link. Only its instructions file is imported and nothing in it is run. A skill cannot give itself tools. Importing is for the project lead.

For developers

Georgi and Mira's crew works in their repository like any other. Because each step is a fresh run, a Back-end step starts from the brief and the plan and carries nothing over from the Designer's session.

You control the instructions at three levels: the ranks as we ship them, your edits per project, and the free-text field every rank reads. A skill imported from GitHub adds written instructions to a rank.

On each plan

Every plan runs on your own Claude subscription, and ShipItFam adds no markup on Claude.

Related

• Plans and Fammy How the ranks are lined up on a mission
• Treasure map What every rank reads before it starts
• Connected apps Skills and the apps a rank can use
• How it works The crew at work