The product
B.O.S.S.

The team

You're one person. BOSS staffs the project.

A funded company puts a team around the build: someone deciding what's worth making, someone testing it, designers, a database person — and a board to tell the founder the truth. Solo with an AI you get none of that, so you either invent it every project or skip it and find out later. BOSS brings 11 of them, in two classes, and hires them just in time — never all at once.

▸two classes
5 builders — they make the product A product-lead who decides what's worth building, a coder, a designer, a planner who sequences it, a tester. They do work: write the spec, write the code, catch the regression, review the screen.
6 mentors — they coach you Advisory only. They never write product code. They pressure-test the bet, name the riskiest assumption, and tell you when the honest answer is “not yet.” This class is the part almost nothing else ships.

The difference matters: a builder makes the thing better, a mentor makes your decision better. Most tools give you the first kind and call it a team.

▸the ladder

They arrive when the project earns them

A one-evening idea does not need someone sequencing the work, and a product with real users should not be missing a tester. So the roster grows with the work — you unlock each rung, nothing is ever taken away, and a project that stays in Quickstart forever is a legitimate project.

  1. Quickstart 3 on the team 16 skills
  2. MVP 10 on the team 45 skills
  3. V1 10 on the team 47 skills
  4. Scale 11 on the team 48 skills

You unlock each stop. Nothing is ever removed — the roster only grows.

Who is on the project at each rung. Nothing is ever removed — the roster only grows.
ModeBuildersMentorsTeamSkills
Quickstart product-lead coder founder 3 16
MVP + tester planner designer + architect customers cofounder capital 10 45
V1 — — 10 47
Scale — + hiring 11 48

Generated from the stage manifests at build time — the same source boss map reads, so this table and the tool cannot disagree.

▸the roster

Everyone you get

Each one is a plain Markdown file in your repo. You can read it, edit it, or delete it.

Arrives at Quickstart

product-lead builder

Product lead for your app.

ask it "what should we build", "is this worth it", "scope this", "prioritize", "does this fit".

coder builder

The builder for your app.

ask it "build", "implement", "fix", "wire up", "make it work".

mentor-founder mentor

Venture mentor for your app — coaches the FOUNDER, not the codebase.

ask it "is this worth doing", "should I build this", "what's my biggest risk", "how do I start a company", "talk me through this idea".

Arrives at MVP

tester builder

Owns the build-health and acceptance gate for your app.

ask it "run smoke", "is this working", "did the feature land", "what broke", "verify FEAT-NNN".

planner builder

Sequences the work for your app — the WHEN, distinct from `product-lead`'s WHAT.

ask it "what should I work on next", "is this blocked", "in what order", "can these run in parallel", "ship plan".

mentor-architect mentor

Architecture mentor for your app — coaches the FOUNDER on AI-native build & technical strategy.

ask it "what stack", "where does AI fit", "is this the right boundary", "should we use an agent here", "what about evals", "should we split this", "where does this data live", "is this premature".

mentor-customers mentor

GTM mentor for your app — coaches the FOUNDER on getting in front of the first real users.

ask it "how do I find users", "how do I get the first 100", "what's the channel", "messaging", "should I launch", "should I post this".

mentor-cofounder mentor

Cofounder/team mentor for your app — coaches a founding TEAM (not a single founder) on working together across different skill sets: the non-technical founder learning to work with an engineer cofounder, the first-time-full-stack CTO, dividing the work, staying in the loop, and the hard cofounder conversations (roles, decision rights, pace, equity).

ask it "how do I work with my cofounder", "we have different skill sets", "how should we divide this", "my cofounder is technical and I'm not", "how do I work with a non-technical cofounder", "are we aligned", "cofounder tension", "who should own this", "how do we make this decision together".

mentor-capital mentor

The venture coach for your app ( mode) — one seat covering how the business sustains itself, whether to raise, and how the story lands.

ask it "how should this make money", "what's the model", "what would someone pay", "is the price right", "should I raise", "is this venture-scale", "what would investors probe", "data room", "how do I explain this", "is this deck working", "what should I cut".

designer builder

Design authority for your app — both halves.

ask it "design this component", "what's the flow here", "what states does this need", "does this match our tokens", "is this accessible", "review the design of X", "what about the empty state / loading state / error state", "should this be a new pattern or reuse existing".

Arrives at Scale

mentor-hiring mentor

Talent / org mentor for your app ( mode) — coaches the founder on first hires, contractors vs employees, what to keep vs delegate, operating cadence.

ask it "should I hire", "who's the first hire", "should I delegate this", "what should I keep doing myself", "what would a team look like", "co-founder".

▸saying no

Some of them exist mainly to tell you “not yet”

The roster above gives you names and one-liners. What it can't show you is the part that makes a mentor worth having: a default answer that isn't the flattering one.

mentor-capital — one seat, not three How the thing sustains itself, whether to raise, and how the story lands. Most tools would make that three advisors; a real incubator makes it one partner who gets deeper as you do. So its remit grows by rung rather than new chairs arriving: what you charge at MVP, the raise question at V1, all three at depth by Scale. It defaults to don't raise yet — and it won't draft a pitch deck while that question is still open, because the half of it that would help you raise shouldn't get to answer whether you should.
mentor-hiring — arrives last, and usually says wait First hires, contractors versus employees, what to delegate and what you should keep doing yourself. It shows up at Scale and its opening position is don't hire yet, because “we need a person for this” is the most expensive way to discover you hadn't defined the work.
mentor-architect — leads with the AI question Which decisions are load-bearing and which are fine to defer — starting with what actually needs a model, and what you're about to make non-deterministic for no reason. It holds the data and schema calls too. There's no separate database agent: that judgment moved into this one, and the parts a checker can enforce moved into /spec and a migration guard.

A builder that says “not yet” is being unhelpful. A mentor that never does isn't a mentor.

▸the one that isn't an agent

There's no ethics advisor to remember to open

You'll notice no mentor-humane in that roster, and that's deliberate. An ethics advisor you have to remember to consult is one you won't. So the humane lens is wiring instead: it's in the conscience, in the canvas's Risks & Harms cell, in the harm-taxonomy practice, and in /red-team --humane, which probes your own AI product for dark patterns.

Why that's the design →