Team Values & Engineering Ethos

1.Brain on. Always.

“AI is a very powerful brain-off machine.” We believe the opposite.

AI means using more brain, not less. The long stretches of uninterrupted typing are increasingly behind us. In their place are constant decisions about UX, architecture, performance, security, tradeoffs, and correctness.

Agents accelerate execution. They don't replace thinking. Our job is to exercise better judgment, more frequently, across more work.

2.First-time-right. Solve the actual problem.

We care about getting to the root cause, not just making the immediate problem disappear.

We strive for elegant, idiomatic, coherent architecture—solutions that make sense in the context of the entire system, not just the task in front of us.

Effort-versus-impact matters, but shouldn't become an excuse to avoid doing what's architecturally correct. We should understand the problem and its implications before choosing the fix.

The goal isn't to produce more code. It's to make the system better.

3.AI agents are tools, not teammates.

Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, and other agents are powerful tools. We want to maximize their yield.

Personifying models can obscure their limitations and diminish output quality. They don't have ownership, intent, or judgment in the human sense.

We evaluate them by the quality, correctness, and usefulness of their output—not how convincingly they appear to reason or collaborate.

Use AI aggressively. Think independently. Verify the results.

4.Own the user relationship and the economics.

We want a direct commercial relationship with our users.

The costs of delivering AI-powered features should be built into what we charge. Our business model should work with the real economics of the product.

As model inference and infrastructure costs fall over time, those gains should accrue to us and our users, rather than being captured by a third-party intermediary.

We should own our product experience, customer relationship, and long-term economic upside.

5.Stay human.

We're building with increasingly powerful AI, but we're still people working with other people.

Be kind. Be direct. Respect each other's time and judgment.

Contributions should come from genuine thought, ownership, and belief in our mission. Not from AI-generated walls of text that create more work for everyone else.

Communicate clearly. Disagree constructively. Give credit. Care about the people on the other side of the screen.

AI should amplify our contributions, not dilute what makes them meaningful.