How Pharos Terminal Is Built

Narration from the video (5:41). The presenter in this video is AI-generated.

Opening

Pharos Terminal is a complete homeschool platform for grades 7–12: a store, a family dashboard, and new lessons every day. The first planning file for it is dated October 21, 2026. It went live in under two weeks. Here’s how it’s built, and who built it.

One founder, a team of agents

Pharos Terminal was built by one writer and historian, Zac Northup, and a team of AI agents he directs. Zac sets the rules and makes the final calls. The agents research, write code, draft lessons, check each other’s work and report back. It all sits on two layers: the front end that families use, and the back end that runs it.

Front end: the site and store

zacnorthup.com runs on WordPress. The store runs on FluentCart, so checkout, subscriptions, receipts and customer accounts all live on our own site, not on an outside marketplace. Every page is laid out for phones as well as desktops. Our videos are self-hosted and delivered through a content delivery network, so they stream from servers close to the viewer.

Front end: the family dashboard

Sign in, and you’re in the Pharos Terminal family dashboard. The Dashboard brings the week together: assignments, a reading list and a progress tracker. The Nexus Points tab holds teachable moments from this week’s news. The Lesson Packets tab holds complete, open-and-go lessons. Subject cards sort everything into nine subjects, and the Courses tab holds our Premium Curriculum. Parents own the account and set up their students’ logins.

Back end: the Pharos Terminal plugin

Behind the dashboard is our own custom software, the Pharos Terminal plugin for WordPress. We wrote it for this product. Its changelog records more than 25 versions so far, and it’s backed by about 1,000 automated tests. Every new build runs those tests and gets an editorial proof before it’s installed on the live site.

Back end: entitlements

The plugin also decides who can open what. A subscription opens Pharos Terminal for its term. Buying a course or a packet opens that product. When a subscription runs out, access ends, and the family’s records stay read-only, so their history is never lost.

Back end: private family storage on AWS

Student data lives somewhere else entirely. Student records, work samples and portfolios are stored only in private storage on Amazon Web Services. They never touch our web host. Each family has its own private space. Files are encrypted, public access is blocked, and access rules limit every request to that one family’s space. The whole AWS setup is written as code and deployed from one template, so every change is recorded and repeatable.

The bot workflow: 15 research desks

Fifteen AI research desks each watch their own field. One covers history and primary sources. Six cover science and technology: general science, space, robotics and AI, medical research, mathematics and cyber defense. Three cover literature, including a faith desk. One covers the outdoors and field study, two cover civics, and two cover economics, including West Virginia’s economy and energy. Every night at 2 a.m., a production run turns their findings into new Nexus Points and builds two or three full lesson packets from the strongest stories.

Argus, Editor, Fact Checker, Website Monitor

Argus is our AI chief of staff and lead product developer. It runs the schedule, builds the software and assigns the work. Our AI editor proofs every deliverable: every lesson, every page and every software release. Every two weeks, a fact checker will re-check what’s live. A website monitor tests the store and sign-in every day. Every agent reports through Argus, and Argus brings Zac the decisions that need his judgment. Nothing goes live outside the rules Zac set.

What it has produced

Seventy Nexus Points are live, along with 25 Lesson Packets. Five Premium Curriculum courses sit in the Courses tab, and for four of them we built 533 pages of course PDFs, every page proofed by our editor. In all, more than 175 editorial proof reports are on file.

Security, speed and reliability

We only claim what we can show. The whole site runs on HTTPS. Wordfence, a firewall and security scanner, guards the site, and in one week in October it blocked about 300 attempts. Student files stay in private AWS storage, never on the web host. Access ends at the end of a term. Every lesson gets an editorial proof, recurring fact checks are scheduled, and the store and sign-in pages are tested every day. We don’t promise an uptime figure yet. We’ll share real numbers once we’ve measured them for a few months.

The team comparison (estimate)

Now a question people ask: what would this take without AI? We estimate a human team would need 17 to 25 full-time people to do it in two weeks. One or two to lead the product. Four to six engineers: two WordPress developers, a front-end developer, an AWS engineer and a tester. Six to nine on curriculum: writers working to West Virginia standards, subject researchers and an instructional designer. Two or three editors and fact checkers. Two or three in design and video. And two in marketing and store operations. We estimate that team would cost $80,000 to $150,000 for two weeks, before management and recruiting, and a team that size usually needs one to two weeks just to get organized.

What actually happened

One founder and a team of AI agents. The agents replaced the hands, not the judgment. Zac set every rule and made the final calls.

Close

For families, it means fresh, accurate, ready-to-teach material every day, built on real sources and checked before it reaches your table. See it for yourself at zacnorthup.com/pharos-terminal.