Five rules we’d rather ship slowly than break.
Studio software has a credibility problem, and most of it comes from software promising things it can’t do. These are the rules that stop us joining in — including the one that governs this website.
AI drafts. People decide.
An assistant that acts on your studio without asking is a liability dressed as a feature. Sensei proposes the move in plain language, you approve it, and then deterministic code — not a language model — carries it out. Autonomy is earned per agent, visible as a track record, and high-risk moves always come back to you.
Cash is not revenue.
A term paid up front in January is not a good January. Most studio reporting flatters the month it was paid in, which makes owners plan against a number that isn't true. We keep cash and earned apart everywhere they meet — in Reports, in vitality, in the compare table on this site.
Thin data says so.
The quickest way to lose an owner's trust is to draw a confident chart over three data points. A quiet week is a gap, not a zero. A new class reads “still accruing” rather than “underperforming”. Where a healthy range comes from a published figure we say which one, and where it doesn't we say that too.
Privacy is a default, not a setting.
Front-desk staff shouldn't see clinical notes to take a payment, and a student's goals shouldn't quietly become a marketing segment. Roles mask at the field level out of the box, scoped per location, and wellbeing data stays with the student it belongs to.
The website is gated too.
Every claim on this site is registered with a status and a source: shipped, in early access, roadmap, or not claimed at all. Early-access work can appear in a body block but must carry a badge; roadmap work only appears on the roadmap. Competitor cells trace to public material, and where nothing public exists the cell says so.
Every sentence on this site has to clear four states.
Claims live in one register with a status and a source. A sentence that can’t name its source doesn’t render — which is why some sections carry a badge and some capabilities only appear on the roadmap.
Working in the product and safe to lead with.
Built and demoable. The section it appears in must say so on the tin.
Committed and in build. It cannot leak into a product page.
Kept in the register on purpose, so the reason travels with the ban.
A small number of studios, very close in.
Early access is deliberately narrow. We’d rather have a handful of studios who’ll tell us the truth on a Tuesday than a launch number to put in a press release.