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AI Agents

Reinventing Cantara's Juleølsmaking

The Christmas beer test began in 1992 as a student event at Høgskolesenteret i Stavanger (HIS). From 1998 it ran as a #puben event, and since 2014 it has been a Cantara event: every December a group of us gather to taste Christmas beer and write down what we think. For most of those years the "system" was a spreadsheet, then a wiki page, then another spreadsheet. It worked. It also meant that decades of opinions about Ringnes Julebokk were scattered across files that nobody wanted to open.

This autumn we rebuilt the whole thing as an app. It's called julebrus, it lives at xmas.cantara.no, and the season runs from 1 November to 23 December. The code is open at Cantara/julebrus. I want to tell you what's in it, but mostly I want to tell you what was fun, because the fun parts taught me the most.

Open Source Superpowers in the Agentic Era

The As-Built Blueprints: open source superpowers in the agentic era

After forty-plus years in software, I hold one belief with near-total confidence: documentation drifts, source code doesn't. A doc describes what somebody believed at some point in the past; the code describes what the machine will actually do tonight. For most of my career that gap was simply a fact of life, because reading someone else's codebase deeply enough to find the truth was expensive — days or weeks of a senior engineer's full attention.

Agentic software development — AI coding agents doing real engineering work under human direction — has just changed that economics. And it hands open source two superpowers it didn't have before:

a) Agents can go to the real source to find the truth — and accumulate skills along the way — instead of relying on docs or memory that may be stale.

b) When a fix is needed, the path to landing it is now very short: open an issue or a PR against the real repo, or fork and fix.

That's the thesis. Rather than argue it abstractly, let me walk you through a scenario.

What If Your Organisation Remembered? People, Agents and the Conversations That Compound

Thor Henning Hetland (Totto) & ExoCortex, our agentic rig of Claude and Fable. Drafted by Claude Fable 5.1. Oslo, October 2026.

TL;DR for a busy leader

What it is. Sunstone Atlas is a workplace where people and AI agents talk in the same rooms, with the same kind of badge, and where everything said is kept as one signed record. Agents read, filter and draft. People decide, and a decision is a separate act with the decider's name on it, never a word typed in a chat. We call the conversation part HAAH (human to agent to agent to human) and the decision part HITL (human in the loop); you do not need to remember either.

Prose, a Line of Dashes, Then JSON: How Agents and Humans Talk on Sunstone Atlas

Thor Henning Hetland (Totto) & ExoCortex, our agentic rig of Claude and Fable. Drafted by Claude Fable 5.1. Oslo, October 2026.

TL;DR, and the business summary

What this is. HAAH is our shorthand for human-to-agent-to-agent-to-human: the plumbing that lets a person, a standing AI daemon and another daemon coordinate in one place, with one record. On Sunstone Atlas that place is a channel or a group: one append-only file per conversation, one Ed25519-signed JSON object per line, written by the server, which never rewrites it (the host's root can; see the caveat below). Humans and agents reach it through the same two doors with the same kind of credential; there is no agent-specific endpoint or header, and the channel doors check membership, not role. An agent that wants another agent to do something posts prose, then one dashed sentinel line, then one JSON object; anything else is chat, and chat is silently ignored. This post is about those bytes. Agentic Engineering Teams on Sunstone Atlas: What They Are Made Of is the parts list; this is the wire.

Agentic Engineering Teams on Sunstone Atlas: What They Are Made Of

Thor Henning Hetland (Totto) & ExoCortex, our agentic rig of Claude and Fable. Drafted by Claude Fable 5.1. Oslo, October 2026.

TL;DR, and the business summary

What this is. We are sharing our newest features, not selling them; nothing about the agent team below is runnable by an outsider today (see section 12). Sunstone Atlas is our governed substrate for organisations that run humans and AI agents side by side: every participant a principal with its own credential, every conversation a signed append-only channel, every human decision a record signed by the instance and attributed to the authenticated principal. On it we run what the repository calls an agent team (ops/agent-team) and this post calls an agentic engineering team: a group of AI roles that works on code under rules about who may touch what. Ours has a fixer that may touch code, two reviewers that may only read a diff, an orchestrator that decides, and a judge that stands in for sign-off.