# Two-year adoption strategy

Written 2026-07-31 from measured inputs: registry download data, competitor
documentation fetched the same day, and benchmark results from this repository.
Where a claim is inference rather than measurement, it says so.

## The one number that matters

**Floor: ~94 downloads/day. Peak: 1,263.** The 13x swing tracks our own
release activity -- eight releases landed on 07-30. A curve that rises when we
publish and falls when we stop is CI and mirrors, not word of mouth.

Organic growth is a **rising floor**. Everything below is judged against that
single number, measured on days we ship nothing.

Two years from now the question is not "how many releases did we cut." It is
"what is the floor, and does it rise when we are quiet."

## What we actually sell, stated so it survives a demo

Competitor documentation, fetched 2026-07-31:

- **Lovable** runs a security scan on every publish and admins can block the
  publish outright.
- **Claude Code** has a review step that checks findings against actual code
  behavior.
- **Replit** says its agent tests its own work.

So **"we verify and they don't" is false**, and a founder demo against Lovable
would expose it. That framing is retired.

What is true and unoccupied across all seven competitors: **nobody ships a
persisted, portable, diff-bound artifact.** Theirs live in a dashboard --
Lovable's is a findings count in a dialog, Claude Code's check run is
deliberately non-blocking. Ours is a file: bound to a diff by `diff_sha256`,
recording what was NOT proven as prominently as what was, verifiable by someone
who never installed us.

That is the sentence. Portable, diff-bound, honest about gaps.

## The second thing we sell, now measured

**The harness carries quality, not the model.** On `hard-2-ledger`, a task
authored so a bare model fails it:

| arm | result | cost |
|---|---|---|
| haiku, harness off | 1/4 passed | $0.86 |
| haiku, harness on | 1/1 passed | $0.54 |

Same model. Same prompt. The harness is the only variable. A correct
implementation cost **less** than the failing ones, because a cheap failure is
not cheap.

Caveat, stated because it will be checked: n is small and trials are still
accumulating. This demonstrates the mechanism. The rate needs more trials, and
those are now worth buying -- before this task existed, the baseline passed
everything and more trials bought precision around a ceiling.

## Where we win, and where we should not fight

**Do not fight on:** hosted preview URLs, visual editing, zero-install browser
onboarding, managed backend primitives. Those are structural properties of a
hosted product. Lovable publishes to `[name].lovable.app` free at zero credit
balance; we cannot and should not try.

**Win on the three axes competitors structurally cannot occupy:**

1. **Air-gapped operation.** Measured with egress severed: `version`, `doctor`,
   `plan --json`, `proof verify`, `heal --assess` all return real results. No
   competitor can do this -- "Devin's brain always resides within Cognition's
   Cloud." For defence, government, and regulated banking this is winnable on
   this axis alone. One required egress (model inference), disclosed.

2. **In-place brownfield.** Lovable **cannot import an existing repository at
   all**. Replit and Cursor import into *their* environment. For a private
   monorepo with internal dependencies, that is frequently not permitted. We
   run where the code already lives.

3. **Cost per correct result.** Haiku-plus-harness beat opus-baseline in the
   aggregate at roughly an eighth the cost. If that holds under more trials, it
   is a procurement argument, not a benchmark curiosity.

## The two-year sequence

**Year 1, first half -- earn the floor.** Every item judged by whether a first
run reaches a result. Ship `first_run_blocked` (done, v8.6.0), read what it
says, fix the top blocker, repeat. The floor is the scoreboard.

Concretely already done and testable: 43 of 112 commands were unreachable from
`loki help` including `loki proof`; a first-run dead end on provider-less hosts;
`loki proof md` so the receipt travels into a PR or Slack.

**Year 1, second half -- make the receipt the artefact people forward.** A
receipt in a PR is a person showing a colleague. That is the only word-of-mouth
mechanic available to a CLI, and it costs no infrastructure.

**Year 2 -- enterprise pull, not push.** Air-gapped + in-place brownfield +
signed provenance is a procurement story no competitor can match today. It sells
to the buyer who cannot use the others at all, and those buyers talk to each
other.

## What would falsify this

Stated so it is checkable rather than reassuring:

- **The floor does not rise** over the next quarter despite first-run fixes ->
  the bottleneck is not discoverability, and this plan is wrong.
- **`first_run_blocked` shows trials dying on something we did not predict** ->
  follow the data, not this document.
- **The harness lift does not survive more trials** -> the cost argument
  collapses and the differentiator narrows to portability alone.
- **A competitor ships a portable signed receipt** -> the wedge is gone and we
  compete on cost and air-gap only.

## What is deliberately not here

No 80-item backlog. The items that exist are the ones with a measured
mechanism. Padding this list to look comprehensive would be the fabrication
this project has already paid for once.

Release cadence is explicitly **not** a growth lever: eight releases in one day
produced a 1,263 spike and a 94 floor. If the floor is the goal, cadence is
noise.