If I disappear.

The objection

Our problem isn’t your code. It’s that we can’t evaluate a replacement.

The buyer, correctly

You have no engineer. If I go, you hold a repository and a document you can’t read, and you have to hire an unknown supplier to judge work you could never judge in the first place. The documentation is worth exactly what the next person you can’t assess says it’s worth.

Escrow doesn’t answer that. Neither does insurance, IP transfer, or a named backup who has never touched the code. Saying so is worth more than a deflection.

It is also the fair price of letting the fleet run unsupervised and reviewing the output rather than the keystrokes. The four commitments below are what that costs me.

Four things the engagement does

Written into the contract before work starts. None of them is a feature.

• Custody from the first commit. The repository lives in a GitHub or GitLab organisation in your company’s name, and the cloud accounts are opened in your name. The owner field on day one is the proof, and someone you didn’t hire can verify it from a printout in under a minute. The escrow conversation is moot before it starts, because the code never had a custody problem.
• Documentation as a named deliverable, with three tests. Written before work begins: it is read by someone who didn’t write it, it runs on a fresh machine from a freshly provisioned account, and it is signed off against the agreed scope. If any test fails the work isn’t done, on the same price and the same end date. For a codebase a fleet wrote, the fresh-machine test is the one that matters most, so it is the one that is run first.
• A rehearsed handover, halfway through. At the midpoint, someone who didn’t write the system runs it through those three tests. A tested handover is evidence. An untested one is a claim. If the drill fails, work continues at the same price until it passes — or the documentation ships as it stands and the next month is yours to start or not.
• Architecture decision records, published. Every architecture call, dated, with the reasoning and the alternative that lost, on a public page. This is how you check that a human made the decisions and not the fleet, and it means whoever you ask to look at the work can do the looking without me in the room.

Two of these are also in the terms, because they change what you sign, not just what you’re told.