Starcamp

What it is

Starcamp is a community for people learning to work with AI in company rather than alone. It is the least finished thing here, so this is some of what exists rather than a tour of a product.

What exists is two websites and an unusual third thing. There is the public site with its waitlist, there is Star — the members' home, where the feed, the challenges, the library and the member profiles live — and there is the company itself, written down as plain files in the same repository as the code that serves it.

How it works

The company is a folder, and the rulings outrank the prose. Every decision ever made is a numbered entry in one long log, and that log outranks every other document in the repository — including the readable explanations written on top of it. If a page and a ruling disagree, the ruling wins and the page is wrong. Everything else is filed in seven drawers, numbered in reading order rather than importance: what the company is, how it speaks, what it builds, where it shows up, raw thinking that binds nothing, the tools it gives away, and what it has found out about the world outside.

Words live apart from the things that display them. Almost none of the site's copy is typed into a component. Headlines, legal text, the footer, the whole argument of the homepage — each sits in its own content module, and the components read from them. The 404 page is the one deliberate exception, its words kept inline so a rename sweep passes it by. The name and the domain live in one file and the wordmark in one component, so moving any of the three is a single edit rather than a search across the codebase.

The waitlist is small on purpose. One route, one table, and two short migrations — the second is the one that makes an email unique per side of the community. A confirmation follows, and it is allowed to fail: the row is the signal and the email is a courtesy, so a mail outage costs someone a message rather than their place. It is the only part of the public site that touches a database at all, which is why the rest of it can be served as something close to static files.

Star is the part still being built. The members' area has its shape — a feed, challenges with a gallery of entries, a personal library, following people, and a back-office for running all of it, including a route that erases a member properly rather than hiding them. It is several increments in rather than the one it started as — but it is not open, and this describes something being built, not something you can join.