A Casa session is a loop with six stops: read, route, make, review, gate, commit. Every stop leaves a trace a founder can audit later.
Read: the company is already loaded
The session opens by reading the company brain: profile.md for identity, state.md for the current level and phase, ledger.jsonl for everything decided so far. From those files Casa derives a snapshot: what level the company is at, which phase it is in, and how many playbooks are ready to run.
This is the part that kills the blank chat. Nothing is re-explained, and nothing depends on what one person remembers about last week's session. The walkthrough below uses InboxPilot, our synthetic demo company.
Route: the constraint picks the work
Casa names the binding constraint, the single fact that most limits the company's next step, and ranks the ready set against it. For a level 0 company with no paying users, growth work that touches real customer evidence outranks everything else.
Ranking is not a vibe. Playbooks carry entry rules, dependencies, and deliverables. Work whose prerequisites are missing cannot enter the ready set at all, which means the model cannot start blocked work no matter how it is prompted.
Make and review: artifacts, then critics
Operators produce real artifacts: an interview guide, an outreach shortlist, a pricing hypothesis. Every artifact is a file in your repository, not a message in a scroll.
Before anything counts as done, a critic panel reviews it against the playbook's bar. Findings get severities; a P1 must be fixed and re-checked. The session records the finding, the fix, and the pass, so the review trail survives along with the artifact.
Gate: the session stops on purpose
When the next action is consequential, publishing the artifact, spending money, shipping code, the session stops at a gate and waits. No autonomy setting crosses this line. The founder approves in the terminal, and only then does the action happen.
This is the moment that makes the rest of the loop trustworthy. An agent that can do anything is only safe to run when the things that matter always ask first.
Commit: the ledger closes the loop
Every decision appends to ledger.jsonl, and the derived view of company state is recomputed. The next session opens on the new state, which is the whole point: sessions compound instead of restarting.
Six stops, every one auditable after the fact. That is what an operating record means.
Sessions compound. The next one opens on everything this one decided.