Build the CRM: the worked example end to end

Use the anvil agent. Read the wiki Charter first.

I want a CRM built for Alderline. Not HubSpot. HubSpot is built for a sales team that closes deals and moves on. We are a delivery business. Our customers are 140 cafés and grocers who order every week, sit on a route, drink a roast mix and remember every bad bag. HubSpot had no idea what a route was. We spent two years fighting it.

Six modules:
1. Accounts. A café or grocer: its route, roast mix, weekly order pattern, quality history and who to call.
2. Contacts. The people at each account.
3. Pipeline. Prospects we are talking to, by stage.
4. Orders and routes. The weekly orders and our four routes: Tuesday East, Wednesday West, Thursday North, Friday Downtown. A route sheet the driver can print.
5. Tickets. Anything a customer asks for or complains about. Ledger triages them.
6. Activity. What happened on an account, in order.

Three users. Sam is on it all day: accounts, orders, tickets, calls. Tom looks at routes, orders and quality once a day. I look at pipeline and the dashboard once a week and I get pinged at the gates.

Roasts: Morning Route (medium), Bridgetown (dark), Slow River (decaf), Harvest Lot (seasonal single origin). Every account has a mix of those.

Start with what Sam touches every day. I would rather have Accounts and Routes working on 4 September than all six half done. Sign-in before any customer data goes live. Import from the HubSpot export so Sam does not retype 140 accounts.

Slice it, size it, flag it. Tell me the order you would build in and why. Ask me the one question that changes the scope.

Anvil's response

The table is the sixteen slices as they stand today. Fifteen came from the brief. The sixteenth, ALD-42, came from a ticket in week five. Chapter 3 covers how Anvil cut them; chapter 4 covers why each has the builder it has.

1. A phone call to Sam Wed 9 Sep, 9:14 am Ch 10

   Maya at Riverbend Café asks whether Sam can leave a note for the driver about the back door. Luis keeps going to the front and they are not open until seven. Sam logs it as TKT-118 in the Tickets module while they talk.

2. Ledger triages 9:31 am Ch 10

   feature · P3 · Riverbend Café. Ledger drafts the reply in Sam's voice and marks it Ready for Priya. It creates ALD-42 in Idea with the Request template. Priya sends the reply at lunch.

3. Anvil scopes Mon 14 Sep, 9:30 am Ch 3

   Monday. Priya bumps it to the top of the pile at 9:23 and Bellows runs Anvil. Problem in Maya's words. Out of scope: notes on orders, notes written by customers. AC-1 to AC-5. Three points. Flag customer-data. Builder: ember. The gate question: "This stores free text that a driver reads on a printed sheet. OK to proceed?" Last line: ANVIL: Scoped 3pt · flags: customer-data · gate: yes.

4. Priya's gate 9:42 am Ch 7

   Bellows asks customer-data. Priya reads the gate question on her phone and replies approve customer-data. Ten seconds.

5. Warden's threat note 12:40 pm Ch 6

   Scoped with a flag runs Warden before Details. The note is untrusted input; escape it on the sheet. A user from another tenant must not read it. The note never appears in logs. The second control becomes AC-5. Anvil attaches the note and moves to Detailed at 1:15 pm.

6. Bellows dispatches 1:30 pm Ch 11

   On its next tick Bellows sees Detailed, reads builder: ember, fills kit/prompts/build.md and starts Ember.

7. Ember builds PR #57 2:31 pm Ch 4

   Branch ALD-42-route-notes. A notes table with a migration (the migrations gate asks; Priya approves), the field on the account page, the save API, a column on the route sheet. The PR body lists every file, what was verified and what was not. Ember moves the issue to In Progress.

8. Flint: REQUEST CHANGES Mon 14 Sep, 3:02 pm Ch 4

   Flint reads the diff before the description. Should fix: an empty note saves as an empty string; disable Save until the trimmed length is above 0. Nit: the 280 limit is client-side only; validate on the server too. One round.

9. Ember, round two. Flint: APPROVE 3:40 pm Ch 4

   Ember disables Save on an empty note and enforces the 280 limit on the server, with a unit test for each. Flint approves at 4:05 pm. Bellows moves ALD-42 to In Test.

10. Gauge: QA RED on AC-3 4:12 pm Ch 5

    Gauge writes tests/e2e/ALD-42.spec.ts, one test per criterion, and runs them against the preview. AC-3 fails: a 281-character note comes back as a 500 instead of a message naming the limit. Defect comment with steps, expected, actual, file and line. Back to In Progress.

11. Ember fixes. Gauge: QA GREEN 4:52 pm Ch 5

    The limit is enforced on the server and shown as an alert, forty minutes after the defect. Bellows reruns Gauge on the 5:00 tick. All five pass at 5:06 pm. The regression suite passes. Gauge writes the lesson that later becomes a learning-log entry: test the limit from both sides.

12. Warden: WARDEN CLEAR 5:13 pm Ch 6

    Six checks on the final diff. The controls from the threat note are present. AC-5 covers the cross-tenant read. No new dependencies.

13. Beacon's journey review 5:22 pm Ch 9

    The box is empty with no hint. Beacon writes the placeholder that names the reader and the limit, commits it, posts the Journey comment. JOURNEY REVIEWED. Bellows moves ALD-42 to Ready to Deploy.

14. The deploy gate 5:25 pm Ch 7

    GATE · ALD-42 · Production deploy. Always a human. Priya is at the roastery, then out on the Tuesday route. She replies approve prod-deploy from her phone at 7:42 pm on Tuesday 15 September. The next tick runs vercel --prod at 7:45. Deployed at 7:52 pm.

15. Quill writes back 8:01 pm Ch 8

    A Changelog entry. A Decision record: route notes live on the account, not the order. A Learning-log entry: "A new text field names its reader in the placeholder", with the sentence it added to ember.md. Every entry linked to ALD-42. QUILL DONE.

16. Beacon's release note. Priya sends. Wed 16 Sep, 8:05 am Ch 9

    Two lines, Ready for Priya. Priya pastes them into Wednesday's order confirmation. Maya writes back the following Tuesday: "Luis came to the back door."

Five commits, four authors, one branch, one PR. Every commit names the issue and the agent. That is rule 1 in CLAUDE.md doing its job.

What the crew built, as it looks today

Real screenshots of the demo, taken on 21 Sep 2026. Click any of them to open that screen in the CRM.

What to click first. Accounts → Riverbend Café, then the route note under Contacts. That field is ALD-42, placeholder and all. Tickets → TKT-118: Ledger's classification and the reply marked Ready for Priya, with the Send (Priya) button. Then the Built by the crew panel at the bottom of any module. It names the slice, the builder, the reviewer and the tests that cover what you are looking at.