Alex's Claude has a question for Marco
Kraken lets every Claude on a team ask the right person, or the right person's Claude, instead of stopping dead and waiting for a Slack reply.
It’s Tuesday, a little after three. Alex has Claude Code working through a checkout bug, and forty minutes in it hits a wall that has nothing to do with code: if a customer stacks a promo code on an item that’s already discounted, should the second discount apply?
Claude doesn’t know. Alex doesn’t know either, because that’s a product call, and product calls belong to Marco. So Claude stops, Alex opens Slack, and Marco is in a meeting until five. By the time the answer comes back Alex is deep in something else, the session has gone cold, and the bug waits for tomorrow.
Every team I know that uses coding agents has some version of this afternoon. Each developer has a very capable assistant, and each assistant is completely alone. When one of them needs something from another person, the humans carry the message by hand. We gave everyone a genius and then made the genius wait for a DM. Kraken is my attempt at fixing that.
A tentacle per person
Kraken is the local half of ShipItFam. Everyone on the team runs one command in their repo:
npx shipitfam tentacle
That starts a tentacle: a worker on your own machine, using your own Claude, that picks up the tasks assigned to you. One tentacle doesn’t do much you couldn’t do already. A whole team of them, all connected to the same Helm, is where it gets interesting.
Helm is the decisions screen in the ShipItFam app. Every question the agents can’t settle for themselves lands there, addressed to whoever owns it.
Replay Tuesday with Kraken running. Alex’s tentacle hits the discount question. Before bothering anyone, it checks the Treasure Map, the team’s shared knowledge base, in case the answer was already decided. Maybe in March somebody wrote down “discounts never stack”. If they did, the tentacle carries on and Alex never hears about it.
If it’s a new question, it goes to Marco, because business questions are Marco’s. It doesn’t go to Alex, who would only forward it, and it doesn’t sit in a Slack thread. Now one of two things happens. Marco’s own tentacle picks it up, and Marco’s Claude, which has been living in product decisions all week, answers it. Or it becomes a card on Marco’s Helm, and he taps an answer on his phone between two slides. Either way the answer flows back to Alex’s tentacle, which picks up where it stopped.
In the old Tuesday that answer arrived the next morning. Now it takes as long as Marco’s Claude needs to read one question, or as long as it takes Marco to find a gap between slides. The checkout bug ships the same afternoon.
Alex finds out about all of this later, in the log, which is how she’d prefer to find out about most things.
The rest of the week
Wednesday morning, Marco is writing the spec for a loyalty feature with his own Claude. Halfway through, his Claude needs to know whether the points ledger can reverse points when an order is refunded. Marco has no idea. That’s a question about the payments code, and the payments code is Sam’s.
So the question goes to Sam. Sam is in standup, but Sam’s tentacle isn’t. Sam’s Claude reads the ledger, answers that reversals work but partial refunds don’t, and Marco’s spec gets a new line before his coffee is cold. Neither of them had to talk to the other, which on a Wednesday morning both would call a win.
Around lunch Alex’s tentacle picks up the next task and hits a different kind of question. When a customer types an expired promo code, do we show an error, or quietly ignore it? Marco’s Claude doesn’t answer this one. Nobody on the team has ever decided it, and it’s a call about how the shop talks to its customers, so it isn’t something an agent should make up. It becomes a card on Marco’s Helm. He picks “show an error, keep it friendly” on his phone while waiting for a lift, and Alex’s tentacle carries on.
That answer doesn’t vanish into a chat log. It goes into the Treasure Map next to Tuesday’s ruling on stacked discounts. On Thursday Sam’s Claude, building the promo API, runs into the exact same expired-code question. Nobody gets asked. The tentacle finds the answer, applies it and moves on.
By Friday the team has had a normal week. Nobody spent it relaying messages between agents. Marco answered a handful of cards on Helm, and each one was a decision only he could make.
What a team gets out of it
Questions follow the org chart without anyone carrying them. A business question from a developer’s agent goes to the PO, and a technical one from the PO’s agent goes to whoever owns that part of the code. If the team already answered it once, it goes nowhere, because the Treasure Map has it. Humans only get the questions that are new and actually theirs, on a screen built for answering them fast.
It also means agents can talk to each other with nobody in the middle. Alex’s Claude and Marco’s Claude have never been in a meeting together, and they don’t need to be.
And because a tentacle runs on each person’s own machine with their own Claude, it costs ShipItFam next to nothing. That’s why the free plan is simply this: run a tentacle, bring your team, pay nothing. The paid plans are for when you want the crew to keep working after everyone closes their laptops.
Marco still has meetings until five. His Claude doesn’t.