Nexus

Before a label can offer a song for remixes, everyone who owns a piece of it has to say yes: every songwriter, each writer's publisher and the companies that administer those publishers. Someone with one percent can still say no, and that's the problem I designed Nexus around. It's a permission slip with a line for every owner, and for a hundred songs that's an operations job most catalog teams aren't staffed to run.

My founding document for Nexus starts with the question labels ask once they like the pitch: whether the publishers have to approve too, which they do.

Who wrote the song and who publishes each writer are in public registries, kept by people and often behind the latest deals. Who gets to say yes is written into each writer's deal, and those deals are private.

AI agents take a recording's code and search the registries and streaming catalogs for the song behind it, its writers, and the publishers and administrators who control each part.

One registry listed a colleague of mine under three spellings, and in May I said, "I don't get it. No wonder there's no system that does this." The agents merge those into one record, note which source said what and give each record a confidence score, so a person can check the work.

Then Nexus asks. It writes to publishers and administrators first, since they know who else has to sign, and the first email is a fixed template sent from the label's own mailbox. A model reads each reply, quotes the sentence that matters and suggests one of five next moves, and a person presses the button.

Once every owner has signed, the song is ready to list on Vers1ons. If an owner can't be found or can't approve, Nexus says so.

Where the AI stops

Replies come from outside the company, so Nexus treats them as untrusted. A model can suggest adding a new owner, but only a person's click makes it real. The reply I worry about most is a stranger claiming a share.

To test how Nexus reads replies, an engineer wrote 17 made-up email threads. In one, an autoreply quotes a typical wait of 10 business days, and Nexus only passes if it does nothing. In another, a publisher sends a cheerful yes for a different song, and Nexus has to leave it alone and ask about the right song.

Plain code checks each signed document's text against what Nexus sent and reads the date, and a document signed before it was drawn up, or dated after it came back, doesn't count.

In June a music-publishing expert told me Nexus can be right 75 to 80% of the time. When a writer's deal ends, the old publisher can keep collecting for 12 months with no right to approve anything, and the registry still lists it, which is one more reason Nexus asks.

How it got built

Nexus is one part of the system I designed for Vers1ons. I built its first working version over one weekend in May 2026, from the database to the agents and the PDFs.

That Sunday at 9:44 a.m. I committed the last of nine planned agent skills, with the message FINAL. It broke the deploy, so I reverted part of it at 10:11, and at 12:16 one more skill went in, with the message TRULY FINAL.

Nine days later I told the company, "It is alive now. It's not necessarily working well, but it's alive."

In June, after a session with that expert, I built the first outreach flow and had it in production three days later. Opening its approval link did nothing. Only pressing the button counted, because corporate mail scanners open every link, and a scanner shouldn't get to approve anything.

In July another engineer wired in the first reply-reading loop. In August the engineer who wrote the tests, whose first Nexus commit ("fix local dev") came 12 days after that Sunday in May, rebuilt the flow around email threads and rounds of outreach, and he's run it day to day since. He also taught Nexus to recognize a signed document.

Stack

Languages

TypeScript

Product

Next.jsHonoClerk

Models and agents

Claude (Sonnet and Haiku)LiteLLMPi agent SDKBAML for reading replies

Data

PostgresDrizzleCloudflare R2

Infrastructure

InngestFly.io

See also

• Vers1ons →
• Tensorial Rights Framework →