What Tyran is
Your most expensive model just renamed a variable. In the same chat, it judged
an authentication boundary.
One chat, one model, every job — that is why the bill is high and the work gets
worse. The context fills up, the plan is somewhere in the scrollback, and
"the tests pass" is a sentence rather than something you can check.
You didn't install a tool. You hired a manager. You describe the work once;
he interviews you until the goal is unambiguous — batches of at most four
questions, each with his recommendation — turns the plan into tickets on a
board, and hands each piece to a dedicated subagent with fresh context and a
model tier matched to how hard that piece actually is. A good manager doesn't
put a principal engineer on a grep: a scout reads the repo on the cheap tier,
implementers take one story each on their own branch, the reviewer can never
bless a patch it wrote, and security review always gets the strongest tier — a
floor no cost profile or flag can lower.
That is a cost lever and a quality lever at the same time. The conductor holds
the plan and never accumulates its agents' transcripts, which is where the
tokens in a long session actually go; and an agent that never saw the last six
failed attempts cannot inherit them, so the second opinion is a real one.
Nothing you say is lost. Remember something halfway through a run and say
it — it doesn't land in the scrollback, it becomes a ticket. Every decision,
spawn, report, merge and open question is appended to a journal committed to
your repo, so a restart, a compaction and a colleague on another branch all
read the same thing.
It learns your repo while it works. Setup reads how the repo is really
worked — stack, validation commands, how things get deployed — rather than
asking you to describe it. After every initiative the team runs a retrospective
on itself, and what it changes is Tyran, never your product code. The same
failure three times becomes knowledge pasted into every matching handoff; five
times and it becomes a rule in your CLAUDE.md, carrying the dates that earned
it. That knowledge does not only grow: entries the counters have written off
are retired on evidence, and two that say one thing are merged by appending a
third that supersedes both — the originals stay on disk, so an unwanted merge
is one file to delete. Most retros correctly change nothing.
All of it lands on one page — a board: what every agent is doing right now,
which questions are waiting on you (answer them there and the run carries on),
and what the work cost, in the tokens the platform itself reported, per model,
per agent and per ticket. The conductor gets its own row, so its overhead never
hides inside the total.
Underneath, a hook decides before the tool ever runs — none of this is a
prompt asking nicely. A report with no raw command output is refused: it blocks
silence, not forgery. Every write is classified against a policy file you own.
And a commit carrying a secret is refused, even inside a markdown file.
Mechanisms rather than instructions — which is the whole argument.
Watch it
What it gives you
- Reports that carry evidence, or are refused. A
SubagentStop hook
rejects a report with no raw command output — measured on 55 real reports
from this project's own agents: 53 pass, and both misses were not reports. It
blocks silence, not forgery; the evidence gate is
precise about the difference.
- State you can read without a session. The journal is the single source of
truth;
STATE.md, PROGRESS.md, BOARD.md, board.json and board.html
are generated projections of it.
- The routing table is one file. Model names appear in exactly one place;
skills, agents and policies are written in role names, so a deprecation is a
one-line edit. The expensive tier is reserved for security review,
arbitration and final acceptance, and those two sit on a floor no cost
profile or risk flag can cross.
- A spend ledger.
npx @jjanczur/tyran cost reports what the work cost, in
the tokens the platform itself reported, per model, per agent type and per
ticket — read out of the transcripts Claude Code already writes. Dollars
need no setup: the published list prices ship, so a fresh install shows what
the run would have cost through the API, next to what your plan costs a
month. Write a rate card only to override them.
- It can run overnight, because the usage limit is a wind-down and not a
crash. The platform's own behaviour at the limit is a cliff: calls start
failing mid-flight and agents die between a write and its commit. Near the
threshold Tyran instead checkpoints, commits the state files, schedules a
resume and stops — then a watcher wakes at the window reset and continues the
same session. Leave it working and read the board in the morning. Both
windows were hit live while the feature was being built; the protocol that
survived them is what shipped. See overnight mode.
Tyran vs. an ordinary session
The axis, not the winner — a comparison that can be made without guessing at
anyone's internals.
| An ordinary agent session | Tyran |
|---|
| Where execution state lives | the chat window, and it ends with the window | an append-only journal committed to your repo, with every human-readable file generated from it |
| What makes a report trustworthy | you read the claim | a hook refuses a report with no raw command output |
| Which model does which job | one model for the whole session | four tiers resolved from .tyran/config.yaml, per role, with a floor under the judgements everything downstream trusts |
| What happens after the work | nothing | a retrospective writes what this repo taught it back into this repo |
| What it adds to your install | — | zero runtime dependencies, no build step |
여기까지가 README 앞부분입니다. 나머지는 원문에서 읽을 수 있습니다. README 전문 보기 ↗
