Commitments

What we will and will not do

These decide what we build and what we turn down. We would rather be held to them than admired for them.

  1. We build to augment, never to replace

    Every system we ship is meant to make a person better at something. Building software to make someone unnecessary is a different job, and not one we take.

  2. A human stays the decision-maker

    Our systems inform a judgement. They never hold final authority over an outcome that belongs to a person.

  3. We do not build systems that watch people

    Nothing we ship observes a person in order to report on them. Our software works from what someone tells it, not from what it can collect about them.

What a system is given

The boundary is the commitment

  1. Two lists divided by a boundary.
  2. Given, deliberately: what a person tells the system, the material they are working on, and what they say when asked.
  3. Never collected: how long they took, what they typed and deleted, what else was on their screen, and how they compare to anyone else.
  4. The boundary is the commitment, not a setting.

Given, deliberately

  • Handed over deliberately, in the knowledge that it is being handed over. If the system cannot tell something by asking, it does not know it, and it says so rather than inferring.

  • The subject of the conversation, supplied as context. Not a history of everything else they have worked on.

  • The substance of the exchange. This is the whole of the evidence, which is a narrower basis than most systems work from and a more defensible one.

Never collected

  • Timing is the classic proxy for suspicion, and it is a bad one. Slow can mean careful and fast can mean fluent, so the signal mostly encodes who is being watched.

  • Keystroke history is available to anything running in a browser. Not collecting it is a choice, and it is the choice that separates asking someone from observing them.

  • We do not look outside our own window. A system with this access is a monitoring product regardless of what its marketing says.

  • Comparison against a cohort turns an assessment into a ranking, and produces a number about a person rather than an account of what they understood.