Architecture for a One-Person Research Business: Progressive Determinism Around Codex
DutyOnly4308 · reddit · 2026-10-03
A Reddit dev shares Dewey, an AI research/knowledge-work system for a one-person business: not one giant agent but a collection of systems around a strong generalist (mostly Codex) — persistent project state, evidence workflows, provenance, reusable methods, deterministic checks, recovery, and governance. Core principles: progressive determinism — let flexible models handle messy work, then harden stable pieces into plain software, validators, or bounded workflows; and separating work from worker — the same bounded operation can go to Codex, a cheaper model, a specialist agent, a script, or a human, with state and rules kept out of the worker's context. Pipeline: persistent state → bounded task → appropriate worker → structured result → validation → state update. The metric that matters most is human attention per unit of valuable output, not token cost.
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