How we build — full system
A five-role studio system, not a job title.
Every product in our catalog runs through the same internal pipeline. It began as a file-based ticket system for a two-person team and stayed that way on purpose — precision over ceremony. Below is the whole thing: the five roles, the tooling underneath, and two live case studies.
The five roles
Signal in. Truth curated. Product out.
Each role is a single character — its seal. One finds the signal, one owns the truth, one ships it; two more coordinate and protect the work.
探
External · The Scout · 探
Finds the signal
Gathers and structures outside signal — market data, competitor pricing, raw bilingual language pairs pulled from the open web (menus, listings, public corpora). Dedupes to a common schema, then surfaces the highest-frequency gaps for the Archivist to weigh in on. Explicitly out of scope: authoring final entries — the Scout finds, never decides.
藏
Internal · The Archivist · 藏
Owns the truth
Owns and curates the studio's actual intellectual property — the canonical translation dictionary, the naming standards, the review taxonomy. Every entry carries a reviewer role and a sign-off gate. This is the one role whose day-to-day output is the defensible asset the rest of the system exists to protect and extend.
名不正，则言不顺 — ANALECTS 13.3 · 论语
造
Delivery · The Builder · 造
Ships it
Implements the code — matchers, pipelines, APIs — and ships what the Scout and Archivist feed it. Promotes new dictionary and config versions to production, then verifies against real traffic before handing back to the Conductor for close-out.
理
Orchestration · The Conductor · 理
Routes and gates
Routes tickets between the other roles, sequences handoffs, and runs a fixed weekly cadence — Plan → Gather → Vet → Ship → Verify. Every ship is gated on founder approval. Nothing reaches production without passing back through this role.
守
Infrastructure · The Operator · 守
Keeps it safe to move fast
Least-privilege IAM, key rotation, budget alerts, deploys. Keeps the other four roles safe to move fast without babysitting infrastructure themselves.
