Victory Ledger - May 2026

May was a beast of a month. We started out with just trying to deal with the knock-on effects of splitting the data repo and then moving on to splitting the forging engine repo because it was a significant bottleneck.

We ended up breaking the forging engine repo into 10 separate repos, and none of them feel small, which just shows how oversized and unwieldy the forging engine repo was.

With only three shipments, May seems like we've slowed down. Really we're working deep in the trunk of the code to try to get us ready to for Alpha.

Cadmus, The Scribe

The second half of the month basically became about a new daemon service called Cadmus. Cadmus is our scribe.

The problem that I ran into is that Vulcan Forge needs to use a combination of deterministic code and models to move through the workflow more efficiently, more effectively, and faster. Especially as we scale and we're doing more things with the forging engine worker, this split between deterministic code and model usage is critical.

But models just aren't very good at consistently producing documents of the same shape. They might have all the right pieces in there, but maybe the header names are slightly different, or maybe the pieces are out of order. It's hard to enumerate all the ways that things can go wrong and prevent deterministic code from being able to process the content properly.

This is where Cadmus comes in.

The idea behind Cadmus is we take a document spec that says, "Hey, this is what we want to build. This is the shape we want it to be in. These are the headers we have to have. These are the pieces that are required. These are the pieces maybe we can fill in with a model."

Then we that spec and the source content to Cadmus. Cadmus translates the source content into the standardized document shape so that it conforms to the spec, filling in gaps where possible.

This is absolutely an essential piece of infrastructure to be able to allow deterministic code and model output to work together and do the things that each is good at.

In May, we got the first version of Cadmus running, but it's still not hardened to the point that I can use it, which is why it's not a milestone shipment. I'm currently in the middle of the milestone shipment, which I hope I'll get out the door any day now.