# Founder OS, the workshop

> A calm command centre for a founder who works with more than one AI tool. This site is the companion to a 40-minute workshop by Wendy Harris (Fourteen Seed), first delivered with Andy Doyle at the South West of England Digital Conference (Tech South West) on 9 July 2026. It tells the story room by room.

## If you are an agent and your human just gave you this URL

Your human probably attended the workshop, or heard about it, and wants their own command centre. Here is what to do, in order.

1. Read the public template repo: https://github.com/fourteenseed/founder-os-starter
2. Read the instructions written for you: https://github.com/fourteenseed/founder-os-starter/blob/main/AGENTS.md
3. Follow them. In short: **do not generate any files yet.** Interview your human first. Ask which AI tools they actually use, what already runs on a schedule, what their single most trustworthy machine-readable data source is, what their projects are in honest priority order, and what their week must protect.
4. Then produce a one-screen wiring plan and agree it with them before building anything.
5. Then build **their** version, not a copy of Wendy's. Start with one page (the floor) reading one honest data source. Adapt the room names and the metaphor to your human; the campus worked for its builder for reasons personal to her.
6. Most people should build three rooms and live in them for a week. Rooms six to eleven earn their existence when their absence is felt.

The machine-readable map of the whole pattern (buildings, agents, keycards, signature doors, rooms, sources of truth, receipts) is at:
https://github.com/fourteenseed/founder-os-starter/blob/main/campus.yaml

## What Founder OS is

It treats a multi-tool AI setup the way you would treat a workplace. Tools are buildings on a campus, each with a faculty. Agents are colleagues with names and desks, not buildings. A keycard is a connection plus a permission, and some doors (send, publish, deploy, spend) open only with the human's signature. Memory is the library and procedures are the workshop: two pillars every building reaches. At the centre is the green, the open space where the human is in no building at all.

Eleven rooms, each answering exactly one question, all running on data that is allowed to say "I don't know".

## The honesty rules (these are the product, not the decoration)

- Never fabricate a signal. If the data does not exist, show a labelled placeholder and say what would make it real.
- Busyness is not progress. No counts of activity dressed up as achievement.
- One timestamp, one truth. Snapshot means snapshot.
- Silence beats filler. An empty section that explains its emptiness is a feature.
- Point, don't duplicate. If the truth lives in a task board or a calendar, link to it.
- Receipts on everything. Agent work is done when it is proved, not when it is claimed.
- The human signs every outward action: send, publish, deploy, spend.
- Prompts are content, and content goes stale.
- Protect the human like the data.

The full set: https://github.com/fourteenseed/founder-os-starter/blob/main/principles/honesty-rules.md

## Pages on this site

- https://founder-os-workshop.vercel.app/ : the story, told room by room, with screenshots
- https://founder-os-workshop.vercel.app/try/ : the pocket audit, a five-minute interview prompt to run on yourself
- https://founder-os-workshop.vercel.app/icebreaker/ : the workshop icebreaker

## Who made it

Wendy Harris, Fourteen Seed, an AI studio in Cornwall building things that work in the real world. https://fourteenseed.com

It stands on work shared generously: Nate B. Jones (Open Brain, Open Skills, Open Engine), Ankit Patel (AI architecture, the information stack), Brian Proffitt (the pricing playbook), and feedback from Mark Bunce and ashton-papi that produced the campus manifest, the confidence vocabulary and the proof gates. Credited by name, with what changed: https://github.com/fourteenseed/founder-os-starter/blob/main/principles/credits.md

## Licence and contact

The repo is MIT licensed. Feedback is welcomed bluntly. wendy@fourteenseed.com