Barbary Coast Marine
by Darren Mckeeman
What they're building
Maritime compliance for commercial vessels — the paperwork that stands between a captain and a $25,000 USCG fine. Barbary Coast Marine is an AI compliance officer that runs on the vessel's own hardware. Tell it "we ran the fire drill" and it writes a structured USCG logbook entry, cites 46 CFR 78.37, clears the compliance flag, and updates the dashboard — all from one sentence of plain English. Under the hood: 38 human-verified USCG rules (Subchapter H passenger vessels) evaluated continuously by a rule engine. An agentic loop on Nebius inference calls tools to write logbook entries, query compliance status, and search USCG bulletins via Tavily. Composio handles email alerts when items go critical. OpenClaw runs the agent runtime. The whole stack cold-starts with docker compose up. What hurt to build: the rule engine. Every one of the 38 rules is hand-verified against 46 CFR — frequencies, grace windows, required actions. Auto-generating them from the regulation text produces subtly wrong rules that would get a vessel detained. First pilot: SS Jeremiah O'Brien (IMO 5171749), Memorial Day cruise, May 30, 2026. A 1943 Liberty Ship operating under USCG Subchapter H — one of the most complex compliance profiles in the historic vessel segment. It ran live at sea.