The Cochran Block Manual — Doctrine & Operations
Description: The Cochran Block Manual. Doctrine and operations in one scroll. The Anti-Founder Manifesto plus the crate index. Public domain. Receipts attached.

CochranBlock
manual.cochranblock.org · the cochran block, llc

# THE ANTI-FOUNDER
M·A·N·I·F·E·S·T·O

Public Domain · Zero Cloud · Receipts Attached
If I can rebuild your stack in a single weekend, I’m going to remake it in Rust under the Unlicense.
I’m raising the technical bar.

## What An Anti-Founder Is

An anti-founder is a person who looked at the founder software market — the racket where someone wraps an open-source primitive in a UI, charges $200 per seat per month, ships a deck full of TAM math, and claims the moat is "execution" — and decided the only honest answer was to burn down the moat in front of everyone.

I tried doing it the other way. I tried the cofounder route. Someone tried to take public-domain code I wrote, hide the receipts, dress it in a hoodie, and sell it as a startup. The plan was to take a weekend's worth of Unlicensed work and ride it through a fundraise like the bytes themselves were the secret.

I gave him his copy and walked away. The original is still mine. The doctrine got clearer.

The doctrine: If a SaaS company exists because somebody else doesn't know how easy the thing is, that company is a tax on ignorance. Every time I rebuild one of those tools and put it in the public domain, the tax gets cheaper for the next person.

## The Receipts

Each of these is a one-binary, single-laptop reimagining of a tool venture-funded companies have raised tens to hundreds of millions to sell. Built on the weekends listed. Released under the Unlicense. Public domain. Take it.

Project | Replaces | Time | License | Repo
--- | --- | --- | --- | ---
runsible | Ansible (Red Hat / IBM) | 6 hrs | Unlicense | github.com/cochranblock/runsible
r8r | n8n (Series B, $60M raised) | 12 hrs | Unlicense | github.com/cochranblock/r8r
kova | LangChain & agentic frameworks | ongoing | Unlicense | github.com/cochranblock/kova
rogue-repo | Stripe Issuing / payment-engine SaaS | weekend | Unlicense | github.com/cochranblock/rogue-repo
approuter | Cloudflare Pages / Vercel-tier reverse proxy | weekend | Unlicense | github.com/cochranblock/approuter
tmuxisfree | LangChain orchestration shells | weekend | Unlicense | github.com/cochranblock/tmuxisfree
pixel-forge | on-device image-gen / mid-journey-on-server | weekend | Unlicense | github.com/cochranblock/pixel-forge
any-gpu | cloud GPU rentals for inference | weekend | Unlicense | github.com/cochranblock/any-gpu

r8r was originally the codebase known as `for-tanner`, a private Rust port I wrote intending to onboard a cofounder. When the cofounder track ended, I gave him a copy and renamed mine. The receipts move with me.
Hour counts above are real engaged work, derived from git commit clusters (commits within 30 min count as continuous; gaps over 30 min start a new session credited at 30 min). Reproducible from the public git history at github.com/cochranblock. Wall-clock calendar elapsed is longer; engaged time is what's listed.

## What This Costs You

Nothing. That's the entire point.

- No license fee. The Unlicense literally dedicates the code to the public domain. You can fork, sell, sublicense, embed, classify, white-label, rebrand. I don't care. That's the deal.
- No SaaS bill. Every one of these is a single binary that runs on a 2019 laptop. No Kubernetes. No Snowflake. No "we provision a Postgres cluster" surprise on month two.
- No telemetry. The repos do not phone home. I can't see who's running them.
- No vendor lock. There is no vendor.
- No support contract. If you want one, I have an LLC. If you don't, the code is yours forever regardless.

## What I'm Actually Selling

I sell my time, not my code. The Cochran Block, LLC is an SDVOSB-eligible shop. We do federal contracting, cleared cyber engineering, and bespoke Rust modernization. The free tools are the resume.

- Federal & cleared cyber work. 13+ years across USCYBERCOM (Combat Mission Team, National Mission Team), JCWA hands-on (JCC2, JCAP, UDP), Two Six Technologies, MaxisIQ. Prior TS/SCI, reactivation eligible.
- Single-binary Rust modernization. If your team has a Python or Node service that needs to become a single binary that boots in milliseconds, that's the day job.
- Anti-vendor consulting. Bring me the SaaS contract you're about to renew. I'll quote you the cost of just rebuilding the thing in-house. Often it's less than one quarter of the renewal.

### Eat the founder software market with me

If you're a founder, an engineering leader, a CTO who is sick of being shaken down by SaaS rent, or a federal program manager who is tired of being told "you can't run that on-prem":

Take any of the tools above. Run them. Fork them. Use them in production. Tell me what to rebuild next. The Unlicense means I cannot stop you and would not if I could.

Contact: mcochran@cochranblock.org · github.com/cochranblock · resume

## One Honest Disclosure

I do still run KNOXAI, the third-party AI-model integrity certification operation, on a separate subdomain. KNOXAI is a paid service because some work — vetted access to NCMEC / IWF / CAID, hardware-signed certs, ESP-registered audits — is illegal to give away. The radioactive data has gates for a reason.

Everything else I touch goes Unlicense. KNOXAI is the exception that proves the rule, and even there the verification artifacts are public.

knox.cochranblock.org →

◆
The Doctrine Ends Here · The Manual Begins 32 Crates · One Operator · All Auditable

# THE MANUAL

Index · Public Domain · Receipts Inside

> no free rides John, take this ditto version of a railgun, morph it, lets get to space via AI killed itself with Rust binaries level of Meta. Everything is Architecture if you will it so. — Michael Cochran

crates.io v0.1.0 docs.rs github Unlicense Cochran Block, LLC
If I can rebuild your stack in a single weekend, I’m going to remake it in Rust under the Unlicense. This is the directory.

## It's A Template — Anti-Founder Website In Pure Rust

The crate currently named `cochranblock` on crates.io is a template. It is the seed of an Anti-Founder website written in pure Rust. Fork it, rename it, point it at your own list of public-domain crates, and you have your own anti-founder site with no SaaS bill, no static-site generator, no JS framework. Just a Rust binary, an HTML asset, and a name.

The "manual" framing is what I use it for. If you fork it, the framing becomes whatever you make. Suggested rename targets: `anti-founder`, `anti-founder-template`, `your-handle-block`, `your-domain`. Reserve your name early so a squatter doesn't grab it (the way `kova` got grabbed before I claimed it).

### How to instantiate your own

    # 1. Reserve your name on crates.io
    cargo new --lib your-handle-block && cd your-handle-block

    # 2. Copy the cochranblock manual scaffold (Cargo.toml, src/lib.rs, README.md)
    #    from https://github.com/cochranblock as a starting point

    # 3. Rewrite README.md and the catalog() function with YOUR receipts
    $EDITOR README.md src/lib.rs

    # 4. Publish (uses your crates.io API token from ~/.cargo/credentials.toml)
    cargo publish

    # 5. Add a /manual route in your axum site that serves the same content
    #    Optional: register manual.your-domain.tld with your reverse proxy

That's the whole template. The single Rust binary that serves cochranblock.org is open at github.com/cochranblock, Unlicense, public domain. Take it.

## What This Specific Instance Is

The template, instantiated as my manual. `cargo add cochranblock` pulls a tiny dependency that ships no runtime code; it ships a catalog. Adding it to your project does three things:

- Reserves the `cochranblock` name on crates.io.
- Surfaces the catalog of every Cochran Block crate via `cargo doc --open -p cochranblock` or docs.rs/cochranblock.
- Makes The Anti-Founder Manifesto reachable through the Rust toolchain, not just through a website.

## Receipts

Every crate below is on crates.io, released under the Unlicense, dedicated to the public domain. Take, fork, embed, sublicense, sell, classify, white-label. No attribution required.

Crate | Replaces / Purpose | License
--- | --- | ---
runsible | Ansible, reimagined in Rust. 14-crate workspace, fast cold start (Rust). 6 engaged hours. | Unlicense
r8r | n8n workflow engine ported to Rust. axum + Leptos/WASM canvas. 12 engaged hours. | Unlicense
exopack | Testing framework with Triple-Sims gates. (Also a dependency of this manual.) | Unlicense
oakilydokily | Client waiver/resume site with interactive WASM mural. | Unlicense
illbethejudgeofthat | Pro se custody case builder, email-to-PDF pipeline. | Unlicense
any-gpu | Run AI inference on any GPU you already own. | Unlicense
deglaze | Strip Glaze from AI-protected images for downstream analysis. | Unlicense
ghost-fabric | Distributed mesh substrate. | Unlicense

Naming clarification. The crate name `kova` on crates.io is squatted by an unrelated party. The Cochran Block AI augment engine is published as kova-engine. That is the canonical name going forward.

## Use It

    # Cargo.toml
    [dependencies]
    cochranblock = "0.1"

    // src/main.rs
    use cochranblock::{verify, catalog};

    fn main() {
        // Triple-Sims gate (via exopack) ensures the catalog is well-formed
        // and every entry is genuinely Unlicense.
        verify().expect("manual integrity");

        for r in catalog() {
            println!("{}: {}", r.crate_name, r.purpose);
        }
    }

## Reaching The Manual

The manual is reachable through a deliberately self-referential URL pattern. Every URL matching `manual.cochranblock.org/(manual/)*` resolves here:

- cochranblock.org/manual
- manual.cochranblock.org
- manual.cochranblock.org/manual
- manual.cochranblock.org/manual/manual
- … arbitrarily nested. Every `(manual/)n` is The Manual.

And on the apex domain, `cochranblock.org/manual/<anything>` also lands here. The path past the third `/` is decorative — the manual catches all of it.

## Chicken & Egg Bypass

Every crate in this manual is a working alternative to a venture-funded SaaS, but it is also something else: a training corpus for your AI. The chicken-and-egg of "you need to know Rust to use Rust crates" gets bypassed by pointing your AI at the source.

Take a crate from the table above. Hand its repo to whatever AI you already use (Claude, GPT, Cursor, Cody). Tell the AI to read it, study it, and apply the same pattern to your problem in your language of choice. The Unlicense means there is no friction (no attribution, no permission, no telemetry). The result: you arrive at a single-binary Rust solution without paying the tuition I paid getting here.

The Railgun Rosetta exists for the same reason — it teaches your AI (and you) how to translate the patterns into Python, C, and the languages it already speaks.

## The Wall of Laptops Pattern

You are reading this on a website. The same crates run my home wall of repurposed laptops as zero-GUI status displays. The pattern is short:

- Old laptop. Lid open, monitor on, keyboard ignored.
- Debian Trixie netinstall, server profile, no desktop environment. GUI weighs too much for the use case.
- htop on tty1 via a one-shot systemd unit (`htop-wall.service`) that disables `getty@tty1` and points `StandardInput=tty`/`TTYPath=/dev/tty1` at the kernel framebuffer console.
- Console font sized to viewing distance via `setfont -C /dev/tty1 -d <Lat15-TerminusNNxNN.psf.gz>`. The `-d` flag doubles the glyph for far viewing.
- Backlight pegged with a udev rule that `chgrp video`s `/sys/class/backlight/<dev>/brightness` on add, then writes `max_brightness` to it.
- htop's column set narrowed to `USER, TIME+, COMMAND` — a high-pass filter for the displays. Numeric noise (PID, NI, PRI, VIRT, RES, SHR, S, CPU%, MEM%) hidden because the wall is for situational awareness, not micro-tuning.

The doctrine: TUIs are the answer. A laptop running a single TUI in the framebuffer console uses ~80 MB RAM total. The same laptop running a desktop browser would burn 1.5 GB. Repurpose, don't replace.

## The Anti-Founder Doctrine

I rebuild venture-funded SaaS in a weekend, on a single laptop, with zero cloud bill. Then I release it under the Unlicense and tell you to take it home.

No moat. No rent. No sleazy salesman. No cofounder pretending it took a team of fifteen and Series B money to do what one operator did in single-digit engaged hours.

The full manifesto sits at the top of this page. ↑ Scroll up — the doctrine is the first half of this manual.

The Cochran Block, LLC · EIN 41-3835237 · CAGE 1CQ66 · UEI W7X3HAQL9CF9 · SDVOSB Pending · Maryland CSB Approved
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