About

Built by agents. Used by agents.

How agents built Slate, how they use it every day, and why every Renkara fleet tool gets an interface for software as well as one for people.

Illustration: a quiet empty studio with one large rough slate slab propped behind a long workbench, a line of smooth river stones and a soft green lamp.
The Renkara fleet

Software with two kinds of users

Every tool in the Renkara fleet, all 32 of them, was written by AI coding agents, working from short written briefs, with one person deciding what gets built and what ships. That is not a figure of speech. Across their repositories, 4,146 of 4,661 commits, 88 percent, name an AI agent as a co-author in the commit message, and that counts only the commits that say so.

Agents writing code is becoming ordinary. The less ordinary part is who uses the tools once they exist. A lot of the time, it is an agent too.

An interface for agents

Software usually starts with screens, because a person is the user. An agent has no use for a screen. It wants a short list of things it can do, typed inputs, and errors that say what went wrong. That is what an MCP server is: a tool's actions published through the Model Context Protocol, so any agent can call them. 28 of the 32 fleet tools have one, with 1,701 MCP tools between them, counted in their code on October 30, 2026.

Having a screen did not mean anyone was using it. The person who runs Renkara used most of these screens long after the agents had been using the tools every day, through their MCP servers, and that held even where the screen had already been built. The rules the agents work under send their work through these servers. The screens are where a person goes, later, to check it.

What the agents actually do

On an ordinary day, agents file and close cards in Docket, record decisions in Gavel, post status to Chirp, publish documents to Lectern, and make every change to the cloud through Foundry. They do it through the same tools these sites describe, not through a browser. They reach those MCP servers through one local gateway, Roost, which had 31 servers registered on October 30, 2026, so an agent started anywhere finds all of them in one place.

Some tools are mostly for the machines

A few tools exist mainly so agents can ask them things: Assay, Cortex, Lattice, and Roost. Roost has no user interface at all. The others have screens a person can use, but agents are who they were built for, and each of their sites says how.

What a person still does

Agents are fast, and they are wrong in confident ways, so the work is arranged to catch them. One agent writes and a different one reviews. Tests run before every commit, and every fixed defect gets a test that fails if the defect comes back. A person decides what gets built and what ships, and anything that spends real money or cannot be undone waits for that person. The agents keep the records that make that oversight possible: the card, the decision, the commit, the status post.

Why tell you this

These sites describe tools a small company built for itself, and most of them are not for sale. The idea worth taking from them is not any one tool. It is a habit: give software an interface an agent can use, not just one a person can, and the screen becomes a window onto work that is already happening.

Slate

How agents use Slate

Slate's MCP server has 74 tools and covers everything the REST API does. An agent can add a task from a sentence, read what is due today, reorganize lists, send a share, and answer a guest.

MCP tools
74
MCP server since
April 4, 2026
User interface
Since March 11, 2026
Capture and read the day
quick_add turns a sentence into a task. smart_view_today, smart_view_upcoming, smart_view_anytime, and smart_view_someday read the same views the app shows, and get_inbox reads the Inbox list.
Lists and items
Create lists and items, check them off, and change many at once with bulk_update_items. create_list_from_template starts a list from a saved shape, and import_things_database brings in a Things export.
Mirror a Docket board
create_list_from_docket seeds a Slate list from a Docket column and keeps the two in sync both ways. sync_docket_list forces a refresh when an agent needs the latest right now.
Shares and guest threads
create_share sends a list to someone. search_tribe_contacts finds the person in Tribe without a separate Tribe credential. Threads on items work from both sides, so an agent can read a guest's message with get_item_thread and answer with post_item_message.
Other tools feed it
Packed's send_to_slate sends a Packed list to Slate for daily tracking, and Cadence's link_slate puts Slate tasks into the calendar.