Strategy
Format Strategy
The form factor of Rewire was the most important strategic decision I made.
The internet has always been text. We forget that because we see images and videos, but underneath all of it is code. Code is text. The pages we scroll, the buttons we click, the interfaces we move through every day — all of it is informed by text underneath.
If text already shapes how we experience the internet, it can shape how AI shows up for us too. Not just what AI says, but how it listens, what it asks, what it can never do.
A markdown file is plain text. The simplest, most portable file format that exists. Human-readable, machine-readable, and structured enough for AI to parse precisely. It costs nothing to make, nothing to distribute, nothing to maintain.
The form factor matters because it carries the entire scale of the project. A 46-kilobyte markdown file can reach 2 million.
But scale alone wasn't enough. I needed text to do something more — to govern how AI behaves, not just what it says.
Every large language model sits inside layers of instruction. Prompt tells it what to do. Context gives it background. Harness is the outermost layer — the operating system that governs its behavior.
Rewire is a harness. A markdown file written as a harness, designed to turn any LLM into a translator for families.
Design Strategy
Rewire's design strategy is built on one principle: design the behavior, not the product.
I'm not designing an app or a website. I'm designing how an AI behaves when someone brings it their family. The strategy has three layers.
Awareness, not solutions. The AI doesn't tell you what to do. It makes visible what's already happening. Most family tension isn't a lack of love — it's care getting misread in transit. Rewire's job isn't to fix that. It's to surface it. Once you see it, you start to shift on your own.
System, not surface. The design lives in the prompt architecture that governs the AI, not the interface around it. There is no app, no UI, no proprietary platform. The system is a 46KB file. Everything Rewire does, it does through how it shapes the AI's behavior — what it asks, what it never says, when it pauses, when it stops.
Scale through portability. A facilitator sits with one family. Cards reach fifty people. A 46-kilobyte file reaches whoever downloads it. The lightest form carrying the heaviest content.