SOS Kit — Solo Operating System

One person. No team. Full pipeline from code to production to monitoring.

SOS Kit is a collection of Rust CLI tools and Claude Code skills that give a solo developer the shipping velocity of a full engineering team.

Why

Building software alone means you're the architect, developer, reviewer, QA, DevOps, and on-call — all at once. Most solo devs skip steps. SOS Kit makes every step a single command so you never skip.

The Pipeline

CODE → REVIEW → QA → SHIP → DEPLOY → MONITOR → LEARN → RETRO
  │       │       │     │       │        │         │       │
  you   /review  /qa   ship   ship     ship      ship   /retro
                       deploy  canary   learn

Components

Rust CLI Tools

Tool	Binary	What it does
ship	4.7MB	Full release pipeline — test, commit, push, PR in one command
docs-gate	4.7MB	Enforce documentation compliance before every commit

ship subcommands

ship                    # Full pipeline: test → docs-gate → version → changelog → commit → push → PR
ship check              # Pre-flight only (test + docs-gate, no commit)
ship init               # Auto-detect project stack, generate .ship.toml
ship canary             # Post-deploy health check (HTTP + Docker via SSH)
ship deploy             # Deploy to production (SSH, GitHub Actions, Render, cargo, custom)
ship learn add "msg"    # Record a cross-project learning
ship learn search "q"   # Search learnings by keyword
ship learn list         # List recent learnings
ship serve              # Start MCP server for Claude integration

Claude Code Skills

Skill	Role	When to use
/review	Staff Engineer	Before merge — find SQL injection, N+1 queries, auth bypass, logic bugs
/qa	QA Lead	After build — run tests, find bugs, fix with regression tests, verify
/retro	Team Lead	End of week — shipping velocity, hotspots, patterns, action items
/ship	Release Engineer	Ship it — triggers the full ship pipeline

Integrations

Integration	What it does
GitHub Actions canary	Post-deploy health check in CI pipeline
Pre-commit hooks	type-check + docs-gate before every commit
Jarvis uptime monitor	Ping production every 10 min, Telegram alert on down
MCP server	4 tools for Claude Desktop/Code integration

Install

Prerequisites

• Rust toolchain (rustup)
• gh CLI (for PR creation)
• Claude Code (for skills)

Ship CLI

git clone https://github.com/aspelldenny/ship.git
cd ship && cargo install --path .

docs-gate

git clone https://github.com/aspelldenny/docs-gate.git
cd docs-gate && cargo install --path .

Skills

# Copy skills to Claude Code
cp -r skills/review ~/.claude/skills/review
cp -r skills/qa ~/.claude/skills/qa
cp -r skills/retro ~/.claude/skills/retro
cp -r skills/ship ~/.claude/skills/ship

Project Setup

Run ship init in any project to generate .ship.toml:

cd my-project
ship init
# 🔍 Detected: my-project (Next.js)
# ✅ Created .ship.toml

Example configs

Next.js project (Tarot)

name = "tarot"
stack = "nextjs"
base_branch = "main"

[test]
command = "pnpm test --run"

[canary]
url = "https://www.soulsign.me"

[deploy]
provider = "ssh"
ssh = "deploy@myserver.com:1994"
command = "cd /opt/app && git pull && docker compose build && docker compose up -d"
maintenance_mode = true

Flask project (Media Rating)

name = "media-rating"
stack = "flask"

[test]
command = "./venv/bin/pytest tests/ -x"

[canary]
url = "https://my-app.onrender.com"

[deploy]
provider = "render"

Rust project (docs-gate)

name = "docs-gate"
stack = "rust"

[docs_gate]
blocking = true

[deploy]
provider = "cargo"

Daily Workflow

# Morning — check what's running
ship canary

# Code your feature on a branch
git checkout -b feat/my-feature

# Before commit — pre-commit hook auto-runs:
#   ✅ type-check
#   ✅ docs-gate

# Ready to review
/review                 # Claude reviews your diff

# Ready to test
/qa                     # Claude runs tests, finds bugs, fixes them

# Ready to ship
ship                    # test → commit → push → PR (one command)

# After merge + deploy
ship canary             # verify production is healthy

# End of week
/retro                  # what shipped, velocity, hotspots, action items

# Record what you learned
ship learn add "always run migrations before deploy" -t deploy,db

Architecture

sos-kit/
├── README.md                   # This file
├── docs/
│   ├── PHILOSOPHY.md           # Why SOS Kit exists
│   └── SETUP.md                # Detailed setup guide
├── skills/                     # Claude Code skills
│   ├── ship/SKILL.md           # /ship — release engineer
│   ├── review/SKILL.md         # /review — code review
│   ├── qa/SKILL.md             # /qa — QA verification
│   └── retro/SKILL.md         # /retro — retrospective
├── configs/                    # Example .ship.toml configs
│   ├── nextjs.toml
│   ├── flask.toml
│   ├── rust.toml
│   └── python.toml
├── hooks/                      # Git hooks
│   └── pre-commit              # type-check + docs-gate
└── integrations/
    ├── github-actions/         # Canary workflow snippet
    └── jarvis/                 # Uptime monitor for Telegram bots

Comparison with gstack

	SOS Kit	gstack
Author	aspelldenny	Garry Tan (YC CEO)
Language	Rust	Bun/TypeScript
Binary size	4.7MB + 4.7MB	58MB
Approach	CLI tools + Skills	31 Markdown skills
Browser automation	No (not needed)	Playwright daemon
Planning skills	No (use your own methodology)	6 planning skills
Design skills	No	4 design skills
Ship automation	✅ Full (test → PR)	✅ Full (test → PR)
Deploy	✅ SSH/Render/Actions/cargo	❌ Manual
Health monitoring	✅ Canary + Uptime	✅ Canary
Cross-project learnings	✅ JSONL	✅ JSONL
Docs enforcement	✅ docs-gate (Rust)	❌ Manual
MCP server	✅ 4 tools	❌ No
Pre-commit hooks	✅	❌ No

SOS Kit is smaller, faster, and focused on the ship-to-monitor pipeline. It doesn't try to replace your planning methodology — it complements whatever process you already use.

Philosophy

1. One command per step. If it takes more than one command, automate it.
2. Gates, not guidelines. Pre-commit hooks enforce quality. Pipeline gates stop bad code. Don't rely on memory.
3. Cross-project learnings. A mistake in project A should prevent the same mistake in project B.
4. Rust for tools, AI for judgment. CLI tools are fast, deterministic, zero-dependency. AI skills handle the fuzzy stuff (review, QA, retro).
5. Solo-first. No multi-user, no team features, no overhead. Every feature serves one person shipping fast.

License

MIT