System architecture

Inside the quiet engine that stands in.

No magical inference. No watching in the background. Just structured context that people publish on purpose, and a small set of rules about what to do with it.

A
Alex · Amsterdam

Is the Q3 report ready to go out?

SSarah's StandIn

Yes, the final version is in the shared drive. Priya's numbers landed this morning, so it's good to send.

Source: Sarah's brief · yesterday 17:00 JST
01 · The bargain

Written down, not observed

Most productivity AI tries to reverse-engineer context by watching everything: keystrokes, DMs, screen time, mouse movement. That creates noise, anxiety, and a steady background rate of hallucination.

StandIn doesn't take that bargain. It only knows what someone deliberately publishes in a brief, plus what a linked system of record like Jira or GitHub already contains.

A

Observer model

Ingests everything. Guesses intent. High noise, low trust.

B

StandIn model

Pulls work from connected tools into a draft. The author reviews and approves before it publishes. Nothing enters the record without a signature. Zero guessing.

02 · Where it lives

Infrastructure, not a destination

A standalone app is just another silo to check. StandIn is built as a layer that sits underneath the tools your team already lives in.

Interface

Where your team already is

No separate app, no second inbox. StandIn lives in Slack, in your code host, in your ticket tracker. The surfaces you already check are the surfaces it answers on.

Canon

One canonical record

Drafts pull from Jira, Linear, GitHub, and your calendars. The published brief becomes the source of truth: not a duplicate to maintain, but the thing teammates get quoted back to them when they ask.

03 · Three StandIns

Three StandIns, three jobs

One model for everything is how you get confident nonsense. StandIn scopes each StandIn to answer only for what it actually knows.

i

Personal StandIn

Built from one person's published briefs and the tickets they own. Answers questions the way they would, or stays quiet.

Scope: one user
Auth: personal
Function: handoff, status, handover
ii

Project StandIn

Scoped to a squad, service, or initiative. Pulls from every brief on that surface and cites each contributor individually.

Scope: project or squad
Auth: org-shared
Function: state of the work
iii

Routing StandIn

Sits above the others. Decides which StandIn should take a question, or points to a human when none has coverage.

Scope: organization
Auth: org-shared
Function: who, not what
04 · When it doesn't know

The constraints are the product

Most AI adoption stalls on privacy. We didn't fix that with a policy page. We fixed it by making the tool incapable of doing the things people worry about.

Context has a half-life

Briefs decay. A note from three weeks ago carries less weight than one from this morning, so stale context doesn't masquerade as current.

Your words stay yours

No brief is sent to train a foundation model. Retrieval is in-context, per question. When the conversation ends, nothing persists in anyone's weights.

05 · Second-order effects

What changes when presence isn't the point

Decouple context from the person who created it and some things get quietly better.

a.
Time zones stop mattering.

A question at 2am in Berlin gets the same answer as a question at 3pm in San Francisco. It's the brief answering, not the author.

b.
Vacation isn't a blackout.

A teammate logs off for a week and their StandIn keeps covering from their last brief. No one checks Slack from the beach.

c.
Handoffs compound.

Every published brief joins a longer record. New hires read what senior engineers read. Context ages well when it's written down.

Built for teams that ship.