Working thesis · Gate 0
Trellis is a proposed AI operator for the open-source software of a small company: it manages the applications, reshapes them around the work, and acts across their content under one governed model.
“Set up and run the software for my small company.”
Applications keep their records. Trellis keeps the operating contract.
The pain
Conventional SaaS makes the first hour easy and every later change vendor-shaped. Self-hosting gives control back, then hands you installation, credentials, upgrades, backups, recovery, and integration work.
The invariant
If one plane is missing, this becomes an adjacent product—not Trellis.
Select only what the company needs. Provision it, observe it, update it, back it up, restore it, and retire it with evidence.
Ask for fields, views, workflows, permissions, templates, or code changes without hiding the migration or the way back.
Let a human or local agent work with messages, customers, tasks, documents, code, and environments through typed actions.
Plane Steward · proposed v0.1
The first useful version does not install a fantasy company suite. It adopts one existing Plane service and makes one real project easier to create, feed to a coding agent, customize, observe, recover, and export.
The shared model
A model can interpret intent and assemble a plan. Identity, filtering, policy, approval, idempotency, execution, and receipts stay enforceable without trusting model prose.
See what is proven and what is notSovereignty, made testable
For the first proof, sovereignty means declared regions and dependencies, open-source payloads, scoped credentials, exportable records, and a clean recovery path. It does not yet mean a fully EU-owned supply chain or zero external services.
Read the ownership contractThe build order