ESSAYS · GRIEF-TECH ETHICS NOTES
The choices, written down.
Building software for grief means making choices most products never face. These notes explain ours — honestly, with the real mechanisms named — for families who want to know, and for the people who will build the next memory service.
Why we have no engagement metrics
A grief product that optimizes for attention will eventually feed on the grief. So we never built the machinery.
5 min read
Why AI output is always marked
In a memory archive, an unlabeled machine sentence is a small forgery. Provenance is enforced in the type system, not the style guide.
5 min read
Why export is free forever
Lock-in is the standard business model for memories. We made it impossible to build here, on purpose, in code.
5 min read
Related: how the guiding principles are written as code · how DearestEllie is funded