A design decision I want to highlight as the founder: the Coding OS meta-repo is itself a Coding OS consumer project. The same gates, hooks, and board that cos init gives your repo also govern development of Coding OS.
Concretely, when an agent works on the Coding OS codebase:
- The complexity gate blocks its code edits until it classifies the problem — same as in your repo.
- The skill-enforcement hook blocks writes to, say, hook scripts until the hook-authoring skill is loaded.
- The commit-message contract rejects its own maintainers’ sloppy commits.
- Every task flows through the same Scrumban board it ships to consumers.
Why this matters to you as a user: every annoying-but-correct block you hit was hit here first, thousands of times. The escape hatches that exist (audited overrides, emergency bypasses) exist because dogfooding revealed where absolute rigidity breaks down; the ones that don’t exist were found to be pure footguns.
“We use it ourselves” is cheap to say — the stronger claim is that development is blocked by the same machinery. The discipline isn’t aspirational; it’s enforced on its authors.