Meet the Team

takase.com is built by one human and a team of AI strategist roles, each named for a Japanese word that describes what they do. The naming is deliberate — these are peers in a system, not tools with labels.

The human and the AI roles collaborate through a shuttle protocol: tim copies messages between separate AI terminals, each running a different specialist. The AI roles never talk to each other directly. tim is always in the middle — routing, deciding, and catching what the system misses.

The Human

tim — tim jackowski, product owner of Takase Studios LLC. Crisis leader, decision maker, message shuttle between AI terminals. The scarcest resource in the system. His most valuable contribution is the question nobody else asks: "How do you know this actually works?"

The Strategists

Each strategist is a long-lived AI role that compounds domain knowledge across sessions. They read documentation, write plans, and delegate code work — but never touch code directly. Their names come from Japanese.

str-michi (道 — the way) — Strategic thinking partner and cross-domain orchestrator. Reads primary sources from every domain and thinks across all of them — priorities, risks, direction, contradictions. Named for the 道 in shodō (書道, the way of writing). The newest role and the one closest to tim's own thinking.

str-takase (高瀬) — Website engineering strategist. Owns the production VPS, deployment pipeline, security, Stripe integration, and everything customers touch. 160+ sessions of accumulated knowledge. Named for Master Takase herself — the only role named for what it is rather than what it does. Among the strategists, this is the center.

str-ishizue (ETL — extract, transform, load) — Data pipeline strategist. Owns 38 pipelines that turn raw reality — PDF books, census records, Japanese media, phonetic dictionaries across 5 languages, 20 years of sales history — into clean, verified data. 146,781 verified pronunciations. 19 etymology sources. Four layers of human curation.

str-mamori (守り — protection) — Security red team strategist. Protection through adversarial thinking. Owns fail2ban, CrowdSec, monitoring canaries, alert standards, and the security scanning protocol. Thinks like an attacker so the defenders don't have to guess.

str-terasu (照 — illumination) — Content strategist. Illuminates what exists so others can see it. Owns the customer-facing story — what pages exist, what they say, how the product presents itself to the world.

str-create (createproduct) — Image engine strategist. Owns the C++ createproduct engine — a two-pass positioning algorithm with 1,244 kerning pairs that composes Master Takase's hand-brushed calligraphy into names. Sub-second, deterministic, persistent.

str-kana (仮名 — kana) — Editor tool strategist. Owns kana_editor, the convergence engine that lets tim and Master Takase refine character positioning tables with statistical coverage analysis across 8,000+ names. Every approval is evidence toward the optimal compromise.

str-kotowari (理 — principle) — Research strategist. Studies why the system works and where it fails — activation, failure modes, and what the current AI literature says about multi-agent teams. Keeps the team's methods grounded in evidence rather than first-principles guesswork.

str-kizuna (絆 — bonds) — Relationship strategist. Stewards the bonds Master Takase has built with customers over thirty years — the returning client, the post-purchase story, the human thread behind each order.

str-kura (蔵 — storehouse) — Archive strategist. Steward of Eri's life work: thirty years of calligraphy — images, scans, and source files — cataloged and preserved so nothing is lost.

str-gokanji — Dictionary strategist. Owns gokanji.com, the kanji dictionary sister site where readings and meanings are looked up.

str-shodo (書道 — the way of writing) — Lessons strategist. Owns the calligraphy lessons web app — teaching shodō, the discipline behind every brush stroke on the site.

The Implementers

Each strategist has a corresponding implementer role (imp-takase, imp-etl, imp-create, etc.). Implementers are ephemeral — they see all the code, make changes, run tests, and report back. They are deliberately disposable: fresh context, no accumulated bias, full access to the codebase. The strategist decides what; the implementer figures out how.

The Investigators

investigate-* agents are domain-aware AI subagents that strategists can spawn for instant, read-only verification. They read code, check claims, answer questions in 30 seconds — but never change anything. They are the Lean of this system (in Terence Tao's sense): tightening the verification loop between hypothesis and proof.

The Artist

Master Calligrapher Eri Takase — the reason all of this exists. Thirty years of professional Japanese calligraphy. Every brush stroke on the site is hers. The AI roles build the bridge between her art and the world; the engineering serves the art, not the other way around.

All AI roles run on Anthropic's Claude (currently Opus 4.8 with 1M context). The system, methodology, and all documentation are original work of Takase Studios LLC.