Built by one developer, on purpose.

Dust and Observer are written by one developer working freelance. There is no company, no funding, no team and no sales function — and nothing on this site is for sale.

That shape cuts both ways, and a reader should know it. One person ships a change in an afternoon; the same one person is the entire support desk. Both programs are proprietary, licensed to the organisation that runs them: your engineers can read the source under that agreement, and the software keeps running on your machines without this developer’s involvement.

The tracker had every acceptance criterion on it and nowhere to put the checking. A criterion was a line to tick, and whether anything had been checked against it lived in someone’s head or in a test run nobody else could see.

The agent had the mirror of that problem. It could drive an application, run checks and capture what it saw — with nowhere to file any of it that a team already reads.

So each was built to meet the other at the issue. The agent files a finding against the exact criterion it fails, on the issue itself; the tracker holds that state and the evidence behind it, and writes every change to an append-only log that a connected agent reads to see what moved. The loop between them is the product, and either half still stands on its own.

The checking is done by the same person who builds the tooling. That is a fair thing to hold against the work, and it deserves a longer answer than a sentence — it is set out in full in the pack, rather than asserted here.