About
Built from a system that was already running
Lacunari did not start as a product idea. It started as a coordination layer holding together several AI coding sessions and two people working across a portfolio of businesses — because nothing that existed would let a Claude session, a cron job and a human share one queue without a vendor in the middle.
In its first week that deployment carried 758 messages from 33 distinct senders. 283 of them were the janitor process talking to itself, which is how the escalation backoff got designed: an agent that raises its hand too often trains people to stop looking. Nearly every design decision here has that shape — something failed in a specific way, and the fix is in the schema.
Founders
Two halves of the same problem
Evan King
Engineering
Builds and operates the infrastructure Lacunari came out of: a portfolio of production systems spanning print manufacturing, publishing automation, and a fleet of small businesses run with more machines than people. Works close to the metal — Postgres, shell, single-purpose services on hardware he owns — which is why Lacunari has no daemon, no broker and no runtime you have to adopt.
The recurring theme in his work, and the one this product is built around, is systems that fail while reporting success: the migration that aborts and exits zero, the extractor that processes nothing and returns cleanly. Every bug that shaped this codebase was that species.
Matt Barrett
Go-to-market
Fifteen years in solutions engineering across the cybersecurity industry, starting as employee #25 at a startup in 2007 and later at Cisco in a senior capacity, with a stint in the microservices and containers space. Has led sales engineering teams and run post-sales as Director of Customer Satisfaction — both sides of the line where a technical product either survives contact with a real buyer or does not.
His argument, and the reason the documentation here reads the way it does: the teams who succeed with infrastructure are the ones who understood what it refuses to do before they bought it. Overstating a capability is a support ticket with a delay on it.
How we work
Three commitments
Report, never explain
A gap is surfaced; it is never interpreted. An edge means "named in the same document" and nothing more. Software that guesses at meaning in a research corpus is not a tool, it is a source of errors with a confident interface.
Never claim more than the code does
The worst bug in this project's history was a documentation bug: an orchestrator whose help text said it spawned agents when it only filed tasks. Help text that disagrees with behaviour is treated here as severely as a crash.
The database is the boundary
Identity is the connected Postgres role. Permissions are row-level security. The audit log is append-only in the database. The CLI and the web UI are conveniences over that, never the enforcement — so there is no second permission system to drift.
Etymology
The word already existed
Scholars have needed a word for this for four hundred years. When a manuscript reaches the copyist with a passage burned away, the blank that remains is not damage to be smoothed over — it is evidence, and it is catalogued.
- lacus Latin, noun
- A basin or hollow; a lake. The empty shape that holds something.
- lacūna Latin, noun
- A pit, a cavity, a gap. By extension: a defect, a missing part — the place where the material should have been and is not.
- lacuna English, 17th century
- An absence in a manuscript, a record, or an argument. Plural lacunae. A librarian's word for the thing that is not there.
A conservator records a lacuna rather than filling it, because a documented absence is a lead and an invented certainty is a lie that outlives whoever invented it. That is the entire design principle: Lacunari reports a gap. It never explains one.
Licensing
Lacunari is released under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0. Use it, modify it, self-host it. If you distribute it or offer a modified version over a network, your changes go back under the same terms.
For organisations that cannot work within those terms — building Lacunari into a proprietary product, or offering it as a hosted service without publishing modifications — commercial licences are available.