Lupinus is the Lentago Labs adoption guide: how to find the products worth your time, get them into your own GitHub organization, and stand them up in accounts you control — plus the ops vault you keep running them from afterwards.
Sundial lupine is the host plant of the Karner blue, and a nitrogen-fixer that readies lean soil for everything that grows next. That is the job here.
Authorship: The guide, runbooks, and documentation in this repo are co-written with Claude (Anthropic). I direct the work and review the output; Claude writes the prose. I'm an infrastructure operator, not a software engineer — please don't read this repo as a portfolio of coding ability.
You've got a suite of infrastructure in front of you and about an afternoon to decide whether any of it is worth your time. This half of the README is for you. Everything here is free to take, it runs in accounts you own, and each piece comes with a runbook — the step-by-step instructions for standing it up. Start here:
| Question | Page |
|---|---|
| Which of these fits my operation? | The picker |
| How adoptable is each one, really? | Tiers and the agnosticism scoreboard |
| Where do I actually start? | Your first kit — free, about an hour |
| What's true for everything here? | Conventions |
| Where are the runbooks? | Runbook index |
| What does this look like for a shop like mine? | Five shops, one tech person each — invented orgs, tagged claims |
Want to see it working first? Poke at our own estate before you commit to anything: that's asclepias, volume 1 of this guide, where you can try a change on live systems that nothing critical rides on. This repo is volume 2 — how to make it yours.
Then take this repository with you. Click Use this template and you get a private copy that carries the guide and an ops vault — a place to record what you run, what it depends on, what it costs, and what happened the night it broke. Open it in Obsidian, a free notes app, and the links between your notes render as a map of your estate; open it in anything else and it's still plain Markdown that works.
Nothing here is hosted by us. Everything you adopt runs in accounts you own. If you stop working with us, nothing about your systems changes — that promise is written down, and this repository is what makes it real.
Your product's adoption runbook belongs in your repository, as ADOPTION.md
at the root. This repo holds the shape, not your content:
- The ADOPTION.md template — copy it, fill it in.
- ADR-0003 — why the shape is what it is.
- Tiers — what your product must clear to be listed as a Kit, and how to record what is stopping it.
The rule: a runbook lives next to the code it operates. Write it here only if it genuinely spans repositories.
| Pattern | How it shows up here |
|---|---|
| Docs federation without a build step | Runbooks live in the repos they operate; this repo links and never copies. A product forked alone still carries everything it needs (ADR-0001). |
| Drill and receipt | Every adoption runbook ends with a measured receipt — elapsed time, slowest step. A product cannot be listed as a Kit until someone has produced one (ADR-0003). |
| Opinionation with a ratchet | Every value carried over from our estate is a swap-list row; every structural one names a tracking issue or says "not planned". The scoreboard is public and moves by pull request. |
| Client-owned delivery, made operational | The guide is a template: adopters take a private copy into their own org. It is the delivery rule (ADR-0007) with a green button attached. |
| Vault-compatible by convention | Plain [text](path.md) links everywhere — renders on GitHub, passes the link checker, and still builds the graph in Obsidian (ADR-0002). |
Report a runbook that let you down. The most valuable issue anyone files here: which step, what you expected, what happened. Adoption documentation is only testable by people adopting.
Add a product's ADOPTION.md. Pick anything in the picker
without one, copy the template, and open a PR against
that product's repository.
Run a drill and publish the receipt. Take a Kit, work its runbook, record the number. If the number is embarrassing, that is the useful case.
| Path | Purpose |
|---|---|
guide/ |
The adoption guide — picker, tiers, conventions, tutorial, runbook index, stories |
estate/ |
Your ops vault: what you run and what it depends on |
journal/ |
Receipts and incident notes |
support/ |
Where to ask, and your own escalation path |
templates/ |
The ADOPTION, component-card, and receipt skeletons |
docs/adr/ |
Why this guide is shaped the way it is |
In a copy of this repository, guide/ is read-only and refreshed from upstream;
everything else is yours. See
refreshing this guide.
🌱 Lentago Labs is a pro-bono operations practice for organizations that run on volunteers, donations, and one overworked tech person. Everything here is free to take, and we practice what we publish: our own estate runs this way, in the open. Start at the org profile.