What you can do with it
- Start from the work, not a blank page. Pick writing, research or coding, answer some plain-language questions, and RACK drafts a starting set of instructions.
- Change anything, at any point. Every instruction is a plain sentence you can read, edit or delete. RACK shows you exactly what it is about to write, and waits for you to agree.
- Borrow from a library. A bundled collection of ready-made instructions and six starting templates, all readable before you take anything from them.
- Build for the tool you use. The same handbook becomes a system prompt, an
AGENTS.md, or a package for Claude Code, OpenCode or Codex. - Share a handbook across a team. An organisation or team can publish instructions that others build on. You always see where each instruction came from.
What kind of thing this is
Tom Watson's Inside / Between / Beneath / Around frame is a good way to say what RACK is for, and what it will not do for you.
Most AI tools sit inside the work: someone is already doing a job, and the tool changes how. RACK is not one of those. It will not make your afternoon faster.
RACK sits beneath the work. It holds what an organisation knows about how it works: the way your team writes, the things an AI must never do here, and the reasons behind them. The test is whether someone can leave and the thread stays. That is why RACK asks you to write things down rather than generating them for you. Nobody else can say how you work.
Holding that makes between possible. One written handbook becomes instructions for whichever tools people use, and a team can share it without anyone explaining it again.
Infrastructure you depend on but cannot understand, change or leave is not really yours. So:
- everything is plain Markdown and YAML on your own disk, readable without RACK;
- nothing is sent anywhere, and there is no account and no server;
- leaving means keeping the files and deleting the application.
Getting started
Download the latest release, then pick the file that matches your machine.
| Your machine | File |
|---|---|
| Mac with Apple silicon (M1 and later) | RACK_0.9.0_aarch64.dmg |
| Mac with an Intel processor | RACK_0.9.0_x64.dmg |
| Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit | RACK_0.9.0_x64-setup.exe |
| Linux or ChromeOS, most computers | RACK_0.9.0_amd64.deb |
| Linux on an ARM machine, such as a Raspberry Pi | RACK_0.9.0_arm64.deb |
| Fedora Silverblue or other Flatpak systems | RACK_0.9.0.flatpak |
Not sure which Mac you have? Open the Apple menu and choose About This Mac.
Opening RACK on a Mac for the first time
RACK is not signed with an Apple account yet, so your Mac will warn you the first time you open it. This is normal, and does not mean anything is wrong with RACK.
- Open the downloaded file and drag RACK into your Applications folder.
- In the Applications folder, hold Control and click RACK.
- Choose Open from the menu.
- A box will say that Apple could not check RACK. Click Open. You only need to do this once.
If a box says RACK cannot be opened at all, go to System Settings, then Privacy & Security, scroll down to the note about RACK, and click Open Anyway.
Windows
The Windows version is built on a Mac and has not yet been run on a Windows machine. Treat it as untested: it may not start at all. If you try it, please tell us what happened, whether it worked or not.
Sharing a handbook across a team
If your team or organisation publishes a set of instructions, your own handbook can build on top of it. Each shared instruction is one of three kinds.
| Kind | What it means |
|---|---|
| Required | Your organisation says this cannot be changed. It has to come with a written reason. |
| Default | A shared convention. You can adapt it for yourself without asking. |
| Personal | Yours alone. It never travels to anyone else. |
Someone on your team sends you their handbook as a plain text file, by email, chat, a shared drive or whatever you already use. RACK shows you which instructions are new, which have changed and which stop being a choice, and you take it or leave it. Nothing is overwritten.
If a shared instruction overrules one of yours, RACK tells you. If you adapt a shared default, that fact never leaves your computer. RACK never contacts anyone's server over a shared file, so nobody sending you a handbook can tell whether you opened it.
Credits and licence
RACK was originally developed by The Good Ship, who retain the RACK name and marks. FIELD STATION has since rebuilt the interface on the FIELD STATION design system and added shared layers for teams. The Inside / Between / Beneath / Around frame is Tom Watson's.
Code is licensed under Apache-2.0. Starter modules and example content are licensed under CC BY 4.0 unless a file says otherwise.