Start with the problem
You tell us what is broken, slow or stuck. We read the system as it stands and come back with a plan to fix it — usually one of the two options below, and sometimes the advice to leave it alone.
Incorporated · Ottawa
CODE LIFELINE
The signal stays up.
We write software that answers to no one else’s server. Our own inference, our own git, our own distribution — and the same standard for the systems we build for you.
1:1
Unison
The first string in the Hendricks house.
0
Third parties
No one else’s servers in the critical path.
7
Assets
Built, shipped, and still maintained.
242k
Lines
Across the seven, and still being written.
Ⅰ · What we do
Work for hire, on the same terms.
We build for other people too, and we build it the way we build our own: so that you could, in principle, fire us and still own everything that matters.
Maintenance & oversight
The system mostly works and needs someone who knows it. We keep it patched, watched and answerable at an inconvenient hour — and, if you would rather stop renting it from someone else, we move it onto hardware you own.
Clean slate
When fixing costs more than replacing, or there is nothing there yet. Software written from scratch by the people who will still be maintaining it: applications, services, and the plumbing between systems that were never meant to talk.
Ⅱ · What we hold to
Three principles.
Short enough to remember, which is the only reason a list like this ever changes anything.
Ⅰ
Nothing you can’t take with you
Whatever we build, you own outright — the code, the data, the credentials and the documentation. Leaving us should never mean starting over.
Ⅱ
Ship it, then keep it
Writing software is the easy half. We stay with what we build, which is the only way to find out whether the decisions were any good.
Ⅲ
Say the true thing
An honest estimate beats a comfortable one. If a project should be smaller, or bought instead of built, or not built at all, we would rather tell you early.
Ⅲ · Who we are
One studio. Our own stack.
Code Lifeline Inc. is a software studio in Ottawa. We write code, we ship it, and then we keep it running — which is the part that tells you whether any of the earlier decisions were correct.
What makes the work unusual is where it lives. Our git server is ours. The eighty-billion-parameter model our tools talk to runs on a workstation in this building, not in a datacentre we rent by the token. Our Android app distributes itself from our own manifest. Our sync engine has no central node to lose. None of that is ideology; it is what happens when you keep asking who, exactly, you would be calling when it breaks.
Code Lifeline is the first holding of Hendricks Industries, where it is the 1:1 string — the unison, the fundamental, the note the rest is measured against.
“Anyone can ship a thing once. The question is who answers the phone in year three.”
Code Lifeline Inc.
Ⅳ · The assets
Seven things we built and still run.
Not case studies for clients. These are ours — written here, hosted here, maintained here. They are the argument.
AI Infrastructure
AI Relic
Private infrastructure · active development
80B
Local model
A self-hosted AI stack — an 80-billion-parameter coding model on our own GPU, and the coding environment built around it. Nothing leaves the machine.
Read more →Discord Platform
Relic
Live in production
435
Subcommands
A Discord agent with a memory, a voice and an entire simulated economy underneath it.
Read more →Android
Ruins Launcher
Shipping over the air · build 25
78k
Lines of Kotlin
An Android home screen that grew into a phone OS layer — and updates itself over the air from our own server.
Read more →Community Platform
Ruins Empire
Live · ruinsempire.com
24/7
Radio and TV
A community that runs like an organisation and broadcasts like a network: ranks, vetting, shifts and casework on one side, a 24/7 radio station and scheduled TV on the other.
Read more →Media Infrastructure
Conduit
In production · powers two live apps
3
Storage tiers
A media store built around a simple observation: most of what you keep, nobody is looking at. It tiers storage by what is actually being used.
Read more →Team Workspace
Univerge
In development · live at univerge.life
OIDC
Federated sign-in
A team workspace where chat and time-tracked task boards sit side by side, and one profile carries your affiliations between instances.
Read more →Infrastructure
Gravity Sync
Prototype
P2P
No central node
Peer-to-peer multi-master replication for code projects. Every node is equal; there is no server in the middle.
Read more →Ⅴ · Contact
Open a line.
Something to build, something to take over, or something you are not sure is worth building at all. All three are good reasons to write.
[email protected]