LA.001About
LA.001About

A marketing agency in Townsville that built its own operating system, and is giving the core away.

Launch Astro is the label Agency Astro releases software under. Agency Astro is a small marketing agency in Townsville, Queensland. Hub is the system it runs on. This site is where the build happens in public.

Agency Astro→Open source
LA.002The story
LA.002The story

An agency, a system, a label, a person.

01

The agency

Agency Astro plans, builds and runs marketing for businesses across Australia: websites, SEO, ads, content and follow-up. Small team, a lot of clients, and the same eight-tools problem every agency has.

02

The system

Through 2026 the agency replaced its project tool, CRM, client portal, wiki, review tool and approvals inbox with one record, then taught agents to work inside it under gates. That system is Hub. It runs the agency today.

03

The label

Launch Astro exists so the product has a home that isn't the agency. Agency Astro sells marketing. Launch Astro releases the core, sells the presets and the setup, and builds the rest in the open.

04

The person

Nathan Mulligan runs both. Every consequential decision on the board routes through one human, which is right for now and won't scale, and the board says so.

LA.003Why now
LA.003Why now

Why now.

Five rungs, each containing the ones inside it. What changed is what sits inside the node: a model. That makes judgement expressible, and it's why two things had to be invented alongside it: a sceptic, because a model can be confidently wrong, and a gate, because it can be confidently wrong about something consequential.

Graph Jul 2026 Loop Jun 2026 Harness 2025 to 2026 Context 2024 to 2025 Prompt 2023
Five nested frames: the rungs of AI interaction, each containing the ones inside it.
RungEraYou becomeUnit of control
Prompt engineering2023 · the founding layerThe operatorOne model call
Context engineering2024 to 2025 · the retrieval eraThe editorEverything the model sees
Harness engineering2025 to 2026The toolmakerOne agent's environment
Loop engineeringJune 2026 · the automation monthThe system designerOne agent's cycle
Graph engineeringJuly 2026 · the current rungThe org designerThe organisation of agents
LA.004Prior art
LA.004Prior art

Prior art. None of this is new, and that's the point.

SystemWhenWhat it does
Airflow2014Jobs, dependency edges and retries. The original shape, no models involved.
Cadence, then Temporal2017 / 2019Durable execution. Long-running work that survives crashes and resumes where it stopped.
LangGraph2024The same node-and-edge model with a language model inside the node.
Multi-agent research2025A lead agent delegates to parallel specialists and synthesises what survives.
Team-facing agents2026An agent that works through a shared identity and selected organisational context. The pattern, shipped as products.
LA.005How we work
LA.005How we work

How we work, in four laws.

01

Built and on are different claims

Every capability carries one of five labels. Where built and running disagree, we draw the weaker one.

02

No invented numbers

Every figure names its source and its freshness, or it's left blank. That goes for this website too.

03

Agents propose, humans gate

Anything that spends money, publishes, or writes to an outside system needs a named person's yes on one exact version.

04

Fail stuck, not rogue

Every gate refuses when unsure and the refusal is recorded. What did it refuse and why is always the first diagnostic question.

The opportunity isn't to remove people from the system. It's to give every person, and every agent, a clear job, a shared record and an honest point of authority.

Follow the build on GitHub→