Use case · Open source
MIT-licensed starters for OSS maintainers. Pin a version, ship your app, never touch the registry again unless you want to.
What's in the box
Twelve capabilities grouped by the maintainer-side question they answer. Pick a cluster, read what you actually get, and ship it.
The two things every real OSS project has, written into the template from the first commit.
Every template ships with an MIT LICENSE file in the right place, the right name. No copy-paste from a previous project, no half-licensed dep tree. The registry checks at template acceptance.
Conventional commits flow into CHANGELOG.md on every release. Not a manual edit, not a stale bullet from 18 months ago. The release notes read like the project has been alive for years.
Roadmap lives at docs/roadmap/ in the repo, versioned with the code. Users see what's coming without subscribing to a Notion page maintained by one person.
---
title: "Ship from contracts, not scratch"
slug: ship-from-contracts
date: 2026-09-14
tags: [saas, agents, registry]
author: martyy
status: published
---
Your agent navigates the same
contracts the registry ships. The
template doesn't just scaffold - it
locks the surface so the model
cannot drift.
Your agent navigates the same contracts the registry ships. The template doesn’t just scaffold — it locks the surface so the model cannot drift.
Users install with one command and update with the same. They never need to learn the internal toolchain.
Users run deessejs init <template>. The CLI resolves the version, scaffolds the project, installs deps. They never see a tarball URL, never edit a workflow file, never know what's underneath.
deessejs update bumps the user to the next template version, with the same changelog-style notes they get from any dependency. The update path is the install path — no separate upgrade ritual.
deessejs list <query> resolves from the live registry, not from a hardcoded catalog. Templates appear when published, disappear when deprecated, version themselves naturally.
A PR from outside the team lands in the same shape as one from inside. Conventions outlive the original author.
Every template ships with an AGENTS.md at the root, describing the conventions a contributor needs to know. An outside contributor reads it once and writes code the same way the inside team does.
Typecheck, lint, format, dependency audit — the same checklist runs on every PR, internal or external. A contribution that doesn't pass the checklist isn't a contribution.
Each area has an owner — not always the same person, but always someone who knows the surface. An outside PR to the auth layer doesn't wait for a maintainer who never touched auth to review it.
Tagged, tested, and announced through the channels the project already uses. No release-day scramble.
Every PR carries a changeset. The release PR aggregates them; the maintainer reviews them; the registry publishes them. No 'oops, that was a breaking change' after the tag lands.
Major, minor, patch — enforced at the registry level from the changeset content. A feat with a breaking change bumps major; a feat without breaking bumps minor. The version matches the change.
The release job opens a GitHub release with the same notes the CHANGELOG carries, posts to the social channels the maintainer configures, and pings the consumers via the registry's update path.
Standards
Process
MIT license baked into every template. Changelog-driven releases, public roadmap. The boring things that make a project real.
Users run deessejs init. They do not need to know your internal toolchain. Updates flow back through the same registry.
Templates ship with the same AGENTS.md and conventions. A contribution from outside your team lands in the same shape as one from inside.
Built on this
Production-ready starter templates, each deployed at its own URL. Used as the reference set for what the registry can ship.
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Two doors
Self-serve gives you the registry and the templates. Engagement gives you the team that built it. Pick the door that fits the timeline.