I’m Benjamin Sullivan. I built Formwork because I needed it and couldn’t find it.
I was eighteen, working on what would become my first real venture, and I needed someone honest to talk to.
The operators with real judgment — people who’d built and lost things, who could look at what I was making and tell me what was actually wrong — were expensive, busy, and uninterested in a stranger’s first idea. Free tools were the other option, and they were worse than nothing. They handed me a number that flattered me and a report that confirmed what I hoped to hear. I could feel the flattery as I read it. The worst part wasn’t being lied to; it was knowing I’d carry that false comfort into months of work I might never get back.
What I wanted was someone in the room who would tell me the truth. I couldn’t find it, so I built it.
AI is the new electric current, and the world needs a new Morse.
That’s a line I was told before I had even begun to build, and it’s how I’ve thought about Formwork ever since. The current is the underlying capability — what the new models can do. But raw current doesn’t transmit anything meaningful on its own. You need a code: a structured way to send signal through the medium. Morse code wasn’t the electricity; it was the architecture built on top of it that made electricity useful for communication.
Most AI tools you’ve used are the current with a coat of paint — a model with a thin prompt asking it to play a role. What I built is the architecture. Hundreds of specific behavioral rules across the team, none of which they can break. A constitutional protocol governing how the Council convenes and how advisors hand off work to each other. Named team members written by hand, with specific backgrounds and specific ways of working. Session structures designed to surface what the customer was hiding from himself.
The team is what was built around the model. Without the architecture, you have current. With it, you have something that can carry signal.
The first customer was me. The Council scored an early version of Formwork in the forties. I rebuilt. The next version scored higher, with new conditions. I rebuilt again. The product you’re about to use is the result of repeatedly turning the team on its own creator and taking the verdicts seriously when they were inconvenient.
The most recent version, run through the same Council in May 2026, scored 74.
The team — Nathan, the Council, Elijah, Michael, Sarah, Daniel — was written by hand. Not generated. Each one has a specific background, a specific way of working, a specific voice. The depth is real because the writing is real, and the writing took months.
What I built is for the eighteen-year-old I was, and for everyone in a similar position now — the founder with a real idea and no one honest to talk to. If that’s you, the team is here when you want them.
— Benjamin Sullivan