// zenith

My first article for Code Like a Girl is live, and I’m an official contributor.
» One PM, 20 Engineers: What an Amazon Rebuild Taught Me About Product Calls

The Founder’s Journal lands once a month: a report back from a place most people don’t go, with the reasoning left in. Entry 001 is open to everyone. From this entry forward it’s for paid subscribers, along with the mission file, the one-page room diagnostic from The Room Has Failed series.

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/* Today’s oracle: The Sower · 04

One day, people will get tired of technology that doesn’t reflect them, built in rooms that don’t represent them. I’m not waiting for that day — I’m planting for it. Every seed goes in now: the practice, the programs, the proof. You don’t plant because people are watching. You plant so the food is there when the hunger arrives.

Hard ground grows the deepest roots — and when the people come hungry, the field will be full. */

The Sower walks a field only she believes in, casting seed into ground that gives nothing back yet. No sprout, no signal, no likes. Upright, she is the planting season: work done before anyone asked for it, in a silence that is weather rather than verdict. Germination is private by design.

Reversed, the same energy fails one of three ways. Scattering, seed flung across too many fields and none of them tended. Digging, pulling the seed up every morning to see if it loves you yet. Hoarding, the seed still in the bag, waiting for a guaranteed season and calling the fear patience.

I’ll be honest about where those three came from. They’re my September. I didn’t invent the failure modes; I lived them, a few weeks apart, and wrote them down.

One seed, in the ground

The algorithms you train are seeds too. Last month I recorded my first on-camera interview, with Jessica Wise from Audacity Magazine. Jessica and I talked about what you’re planting with your attention. I haven’t mentioned it here until now, which is its own small reversal: planting something and then not telling anyone where the field is.

» Watch the interview

Upright, keep planting and stop watching. Reversed, fewer fields, deeper rows, hands off the soil.

// planted before the harvest

This is the Founder’s Journal. Once a month I write down what being a founder and building Circuit + Soil has actually cost and what it has actually given. Not the highlight reel and not advice either — just the record, gritty and mostly uncensored so others can experience my journey and this work.

I’m Crystal. I spent twenty years in enterprise product management and left to build Circuit + Soil, which is five months old. If you’re building something of your own, mostly alone, this is the account I wanted somebody to hand me on the days things are hard. It’s also how we build community while bandaging the wounds, wiping the sweat, and honoring the tears.

Blood

I thought to myself, “this is going to work” as the banner closed on my toe with a snap.

Retractable banners have a cap that locks the pole at full height. Mine went missing at my first market, and without it the whole thing is a powder-keg of physics. I knew that. I was going to rig it anyway, on the floor, trying a paper clip, a binder clip, anything I thought would work, because I wanted to use it one more time and it was almost working. I slid my foot underneath to steady the base. The pole flew sideways out of the slot, the banner came with it, and it snapped on my left big toe before I could react.

It cut a little. It bruised a lot. It hurt worse three days later than it did that afternoon, which was inconvenient timing, because those three days were my first workshops during Atlanta Tech Week and I wanted to walk into those rooms confidently — not limping from a wound I gave myself.

Here’s what I want on the record, though, because it’s the part that’s about building something. The moment I established it wasn’t an emergency, I stopped thinking about my foot and started designing a table banner. Two days later I was at my local print shop picking it up. Same look, same language, no spring under tension.

I loved the banner and how it represented my business. I designed it myself. It says awakening on it, which is a spiritual word standing in a technical business on purpose, because I wanted the people who need what I do to recognize it from across a room. It has a QR code big enough to scan from ten feet, because I’m an introvert and I would never build a booth that requires someone to walk up and talk to a stranger to find out how I can help them.

None of that was wrong. One part went missing and I kept engineering the rest, because the rest still mostly worked. I do this at every scale. That’s worth knowing about myself.

The rest is the sweat and the tears. What the first market actually cost, what someone wrote down after finishing a cycle, and the five dollars that landed harder than five dollars should.

Free to read — subscribe and it’s yours today. Paid in the future.

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Imagine a multi-city tech conference, and you’re attending. You bought the early-bird ticket months ago, a few hundred dollars before the price climbed. It isn’t your first conference, so you know what to expect. Buttoned-up events all staged in a conference center or hotel ballrooms hosting equally buttoned-up people rattling off the same pitches you have heard time and time again. You land in a city, business cards, QR codes and NFC nails1, ready for the standard tech conference trappings.

But what you find as you reach Tech Square, home of Tech Tower and the Georgia Tech’s Yellow Jackets, to check-in to your hotel is that there is already a buzz to the city. You vaguely recall the city being called “Hotlanta” but you forget why. Maybe that’s the vibration you are feeling. Then as you’re checking in you start to sense that the whole week seems to have turned itself over to technology. You check your RenderATL app and see there are more than two hundred and fifty events running across town2, clustered by neighborhood so you can cross the city chasing sessions or stay within walking distance of your hotel. And suddenly you get a sense that this conference experience might just be different.

Day Zero

Your phone buzzes the day before each event you picked, the day of, the hour of. You walk into a keynote hall and the person on stage doesn’t look like the last forty keynotes you’ve sat through. Neither does the crowd. You notice. Everyone notices. Nobody has to say anything about it, because nothing about it is being performed.

One afternoon you follow the schedule to a wellness reset, three sessions deep, and find yourself on a Pilates mat next to the person you were talking AI integrations with an hour ago, because this week considers your body part of the technology. At a half-day hub on a university campus there’s swag, booths, free panels, an apple pie tasting. Between sessions you end up in a conversation you didn’t plan, with someone you’d never have met in your own city, and it runs long because neither of you wants to end it. If you get lost, someone in an event shirt is standing within fifty feet. You never feel unsafe. You never even hit traffic.

Now the part I need you to sit with: none of that happened by accident. Every detail you just walked through was a decision somebody made.

This series spent five parts learning to see those decisions. Parts one through three wrote the script. Part 4 was the briefing. Part 5 was the first scene in the field, where the instrument came for my own room. This is the final scene, and it’s the one every mission is run for: the room that got it right.

The conference is real. It happened this month, in Atlanta, and I was a willing participant with the diagnostic running.

The Disclosure

Before the report, the position I’m reporting from. I hosted two free workshops during Atlanta Tech Week, inside the container I’m about to credit. The week platformed me. I didn’t attend the flagship conference this year, so this audit covers what I could witness: the citywide week, the public record, and the rooms I stood in. Weigh everything accordingly.

And one more thing, because this series has earned the right to say it. Five parts of this work have been critical, and they were meant to be. Rigor is my love language. But an instrument that only finds failure isn’t an instrument, though. It’s a grievance. This is the part where the hypercritical eye finds a room that holds, and celebrates it, with the same rigor the criticism received.

The Room and Its Author

RenderATL was founded by Justin E. Samuels, an engineer who kept attending conferences where the energy was corporate, stiff, and disconnected from the culture of the people actually building things, and who watched brilliant builders go unseen because they didn’t fit the traditional tech mold. So he built the counter-room. Bootstrapped, no venture backing. The first conference, in 2021, drew 350 people3.

Here is the detail my instrument cares about most: before that first conference ever ran, in 2019, Samuels stated the mission in writing. A conference at the intersection of culture and tech, built to advance underrepresented groups in the industry, and he named them: women, minorities, LGBTQIA+ and non-binary people, immigrants, the disabled4. The composition wasn’t an outcome he hoped for. It was the specification, documented before the first ticket sold.

Seven years later, the specification runs at city scale. Atlanta Tech Week, which RenderATL powers, drew more than fifteen thousand attendees in 2025. This year’s opening day alone set a venue record with over twenty-seven hundred registrations, and the week held more than two hundred and fifty events across metro Atlanta. The flagship conference brings roughly ten thousand people and more than a hundred and twenty speakers, and its 2026 keynote was Killer Mike5, which tells you the culture-and-tech intersection isn’t a tagline.

Designed, not defaulted, at the scale of a city’s week.

The Audit

Three of their rooms, run against the instrument. Full treatment for each, verdicts as they landed.

Room one: the lineup. This is the Persona Mirror with something rare: a documented persona from 2019 to check against. The 2026 stage matched the document. The speaker and panelist lineup was among the most diverse I have seen in twenty years around this industry, across ethnicity, nationality, gender, presentation, and, notably, across domain. One session I stepped into was a white man deep in a career’s worth of passion about energy efficiency, at a tech conference, on the last day, at a half-day hub. That’s composition too: a lineup wide enough to hold subject matter the traditional tech mold would have left off the agenda.

And here’s why lineups matter beyond optics, stated as plainly as I can. Everyone notices the composition of a room. I’d bet most white men register it when they walk into a room that isn’t mostly white men, not upset, just noticing, the same way an Indian woman notices other Indian women across the hall and feels the floor steady slightly. Familiarity isn’t trust. But it’s common ground that wasn’t there before, and common ground is where the unplanned conversations start. In rooms that lack it, people spend the day holding a position instead. Sometimes we take those positions because we’re forced to, not because it’s our natural state. A room that prevails is one where people stop holding positions and start working from their natural state. Verdict: pass, against their own artifact.

Room two: the architecture of the week. This is where I was an eyewitness. The week is built so that citizens, not just partners, can schedule their own events into it. Sit with what that means: an organization accepted the liability and the loss of control that comes with letting the public build on its platform, in exchange for width. That decision is why a solo founder with one week of runway could host two real workshops inside a citywide container, in a public library, and have a woman pull a paper flyer off a board and walk in. The events clustered by neighborhood, so access didn’t require crossing the city. Staff in event shirts were visibly everywhere. Notifications arrived the day before, the day of, the hour of. Water on the conference tables. The half-day hub at Georgia Tech balanced education with celebration, panels with pie. My own two rooms drew a mix of men and women across several ethnicities, in a wellness workshop, a category that skews heavily female everywhere else I’ve run it. I audited those rooms in Part 5 and they mostly held. Part of what they passed on, they inherited from the container they sat inside.

Even the organizers’ own post-week note drew the line this series has been drawing. Describing one of the week’s builder sessions, they wrote that the rooms looked “less like an audience and more like a working floor6.” Laptops open, people building alongside the people teaching. They named the distinction without knowing my instrument exists, which is what it looks like when a design principle is actually operating rather than being claimed.

That width produces chains you couldn’t design on purpose. One evening of the week, a server at my neighborhood pub mentioned an event happening there that night: a mixer hosted by a local chapter of The AI Collective, a global community I’d never heard of that turns out to span more than a hundred chapters worldwide7. I walked in knowing nothing. A citizen scheduled it, the container approved it, a pub hosted it, and a server did the last mile of distribution. No algorithm was involved at any step. That’s what an open architecture does: it lets a global network reach you through a person who pours your drinks. Verdict: pass, witnessed.

Room three: the door. The flagship ticket starts around three hundred dollars early and climbs toward seven hundred and fifty as the date closes8. Dynamic pricing rewards planning runway, and planning runway is unevenly distributed: corporate-sponsored attendees book early on someone else’s card, while solo builders often find the week late, exactly when the price peaks. I know, because that was me. At the same time, the free citywide week let me in anyway, platformed me, and cost nothing. So which is it: a container that solves its own door problem, the paid flagship funding free width for everyone else? Or a two-tier system where the free week makes the gated main room acceptable? Their own marketing couples the two: the ticket, their site says, unlocks a full week of free citywide events, not just two days in a hall9.

And their post-week thanks to sponsors credits that backing as "the reason so much of this week remained community focused and open to all10." That's the design reading, stated by the designers: the paid layers finance the open one. I'll note it without closing the verdict on it, because thank-you copy isn't a funding model.

What I can see from the outside is that the free week functions as presence: it makes the entire city feel turned over to tech, and it costs the organizers little because citizens build it. The access is real. Whether it’s the design or the side effect, I can’t see from here; the tell would be whether ticket price and free-event policy move together, and that mechanism isn’t visible from outside the building. Verdict: open. This is the question the next version of the diagnostic formally asks, the seventh question, about the door. It’s also the first question I’d put to the organizers, and the invitation stands.

One aside, because the instrument requires it: a different room of this same organization, its founding team, reads differently than its stage. Narrower, in its own way. That’s not a contradiction; it’s the artifact-selection warning from Part 4 in action. Verdicts don’t transfer between rooms, even inside one organization, and an audit that only looks at the flattering room isn’t an audit.

What I Searched For

A verdict of “prevailed” is only worth something if I looked for the failure. So here’s what I hunted, and what came back.

Presence without power, the pattern where diverse faces front a homogeneous ownership structure: answerable here from public record, and the answer is no. RenderATL is bootstrapped and founder-owned. The layer where the money and the decisions live is the same Black-led team that built it. Who was paid what to speak, I can’t see, and I’ll say so rather than guess.

Operational failure, my professional specialty: I read systems and find their weak points for a living, and I went looking. The list I came back with: the event app could be more polished, the same app that showed me the week’s scale on day one; and one intersection could have used a sign. That’s the whole list. From the most hypercritical eye this series has, at a fifteen-thousand-person citywide event, that list is the standing ovation.

And the counterweight, kept because the audit keeps everything. The attendees I spoke with were measured about the workshop material and excited about the keynote. Conference sessions are conference sessions. A room can be well-composed and still serve standard fare, and a prevailed verdict doesn’t require every talk to change your life. It requires the room to be built right. This one was.

The Diagnostic, Pocket-Sized

You may never run a conference. The room you’re responsible for might hold six people, or one. Here’s what transfers, and neither move requires downloading anything.

First: sit with your room. When you created this space, what was the goal? Did the goal include serving the people inside it, or just gathering them? And has the vision gone myopic since, drifted toward what’s comfortable because the room reflects you and you love it here? Most people running rooms never ask. The comfort is the reason they don’t.

Second: take one person from your room whose experience likely diverges from yours, and have a genuine conversation. Are you comfortable here? Are we compensating you the way other rooms would? Then hear the answer without managing it. Not so you can write about it. Not so you can show an executive that you care. Because one person can’t represent a group, but one honest conversation can widen your sight, and the whole premise of this series is that widened sight builds better products.

That’s the gate and the first question, and both are free.

Mission Complete

Here’s the thing I want this series to leave behind, and it’s the reason this final report is a celebration instead of another diagnosis.

Rooms like this one still have to be built as counter-rooms. That’s the quiet indictment underneath the confetti: a conference where the stage looks like the world exists only because one builder sat in enough rooms that failed him and decided to write a different specification. In a world that composed its rooms on purpose, RenderATL and Atlanta Tech Week wouldn’t be remarkable. They are remarkable. Draw the conclusion.

And a room can be profitable and still have failed.

Revenue is not the verdict. A lucrative room that fails its users has found someone to subsidize the failure, and if a builder is comfortable with that trade, that’s theirs to own.

It’s not how I choose to build. The verdict this series cares about is the one the instrument returns: who is in the room, who is heard, who holds power, who can afford the door, and what the room ships because of all of it.

Most rooms fail that verdict without ever knowing they were being asked. This one was asked, by its own founder, in writing, before it existed. It answered for seven years and counting.

The series ends here. The auditing doesn’t. The instrument moves with me now, into more rooms, at a different cadence: the cards, the build logs, whatever I lead next. Every room I’m responsible for sits under the same six questions I’ve pointed at everyone else, and you’ll see the results, because that’s the deal this series made with you in Part 5.

Your room is under them too. That was always the assignment.

What you can do to support this week

I’m searching for the next field report. The mission file, the one-page diagnostic from this series, comes with a subscription. Run it on your room or do the two free moves above. Whatever is next, may it be well-composed and intentional.

» Run the diagnostic on your room and report back.

The Room Has Failed ends here — six parts, one diagnostic, and a final field report on a room that got it right. Subscribe and the mission file, the one-page instrument from this series is yours.

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// rooms fail by default. they prevail on purpose.

Between Code & Conscience is written by Crystal A. Chubbs — founder, technologist, and The People’s CTO. I write about building technology that doesn’t extract from the people it serves.

If this series is resonating, the best way to support it is to share it with one person building something small.

More: The People’s CTO · Circuit + Soil

Now that the framework is complete, I see rooms everywhere.

A speaker lineup crossed my feed, and I clocked it in four seconds. A company’s celebration photos: three. A career-development event, a governance convening, a shepherd in a novel I picked up on a reading break — instantly. That’s the thing nobody tells you about building a diagnostic. Once the instrument exists, you can’t put it down. Every room becomes legible. Every lineup, every photo, every stage is suddenly answering questions it didn’t know it was being asked.

Which left exactly one next move. Before this instrument audits anyone else’s room in public, it gets pointed at mine.

For three parts, this series wrote the script: the standard, the test, the stack. Part 4 was the briefing, and the briefing is where the movie starts. You were handed six questions and one assignment: run it on the room you’re responsible for. Nobody was exempt, including the author. This is the first scene in the field. The agent on camera is me, and this is my lightning round.

Every honest mission produces a debrief. Here’s the first line of mine, and it isn’t easy to write: there is nothing more humbling than aiming the diagnostic you built at your own work and reading the results. My room passed. The failures were still observable. Both of those things are true, and the honest critique is the reason you can believe the pass. The instrument doesn’t hand out perfect scores on self-report. It asks for receipts. A well-composed room was never a function of perfection. It’s a function of quality and intention.

Full disclosure before the report: the rooms under evaluation are mine. Two workshops I hosted during Atlanta Tech Week, inside a container I’ll credit generously, because it earned it. I taught in the week I’m praising. Weigh everything accordingly. That’s also the point — it would be a strange instrument if its own author wouldn’t face it first.

The Case

The Situation: Second week of August. Two free sessions of Build Your First Hour System, hosted at a public library during Atlanta Tech Week. I found out about the week late, which left roughly one week of runway to build everything: the events, the material, the registration, the AV system, the banners, the promotion. That matters because it explains some of what the audit catches below, and because an agent who pretends the operation was polished is filing a false report.

The Decisioning: One decision was made deliberately even inside the scramble. The library room holds a hundred people. I capped registration at thirty-five per session. I did the attrition math every free event teaches you, and chose depth of interaction over headcount. Room size is a setting. Most people never open that panel either.

The Ledger: exact and small, because small numbers stated plainly are the credibility:

Fifty-seven registrations across two sessions. About twelve people in the rooms. About, because I didn’t take attendance, and yes, the audit is going to make me pay for that. Eleven of the twelve stayed after to talk. One attendee never registered at all: she pulled a paper flyer off the library board and walked in. Twenty to twenty-five guide downloads. The registrants joined the studio’s mailing list through the event platform, taking it from seventeen contacts to seventy-three. And this week, one new subscriber arrived whom I can’t trace. The first stranger in a ledger where I could previously name every entry.

Now the finding hiding in those numbers, because it rearranged how I think about promotion. Registration behaved exactly like the feed: high interest, roughly one in five materializing, normal for free events, normal for social. But the room converted nearly everyone who entered it. Eleven of twelve stayed. Almost everyone took the guide. And a forming partnership walked out of the room deeper than it walked in. The A/B test I accidentally ran on my own business wasn’t workshops versus posts. It was registration versus presence. Presence won by an order of magnitude.

The Lightning Round

Part 4’s diagnostic: one gate, six questions, verdicts required. No partial credit that isn’t named as partial. Here’s the round, called as it landed.

The Gate — have you defined who this is for? Pass, with a correction already filed. I walked in with a documented expected audience like most business owners. The workshops caught my definition doing the exact thing the gate warns about: expecting what I know. My definition has since been rebuilt into four personas, and gender isn’t one of the lines they’re drawn along. The reason is two questions down.

1. The Comfort Question — pass, and I can prove it with two sentences. Mid-session, a woman raised her hand: “I never think about my body when I wake up in the morning.” Later, a man: “I am reactive in the mornings, and I never realized that.” Neither of those is a confession. They’re realizations, and both happened out loud, in real time, in front of a room. People type vulnerable things into comment sections every day, and some of the rawest writing on the internet lives there. But those are conclusions, carried a while and then shared. What a room produces is different: the thought arriving and being spoken in the same breath, before it’s finished, because the room made half-formed thinking safe.

Presence creates permission. Not mysticism. An observable mechanism, and the entire difference between an audience and a room.

2. The Cost Question — pass, watched in reverse. What would a missing voice have cost? I got to see the answer run backward. I invited a wellness and yoga professional, a master teacher and business owner, and gave her the floor. Her review changed the material. The critiques she offered were precisely the ones invisible from inside my own expertise, which is the Cost Question’s whole argument. A missing voice is a specific future defect. Mine would have shipped to every room after this one.

3. The Usefulness Question — pass, verified by a changed morning. An attendee told me afterward she’d owned a digital alarm clock for years and never used it. Within days of the workshop, the phone was out of her morning and the clock was in. That’s the test: not applause. A changed morning.

4. Presence and Power — split verdict, and the report should say plainly how the expertise got into the room. A master teacher, a wellness and yoga professional, was there with real power: floor time, and feedback that changed what ships. But she wasn’t a commissioned advisor. We’re building a working partnership. She had already asked me to speak at a panel at her studio, and she came partly to experience the material before putting me in front of her students. Notice what that is: she was running her own version of this diagnostic on me. Composing her room deliberately. The currency between us is partnership — stage for stage, content for platform, support for support — and that’s real compensation, just not a line item. The miss is still real, though, and it’s this: my room had no designed mechanism for expert review. The expertise arrived because the relationship existed. A room that needs expert eyes and doesn’t have a partner standing nearby needs a budget line, and my next one that does will have one.

And the session did its own work: she left wanting this material in front of her own students. The partnership deepened inside the room, even though it didn’t begin there. Nothing I have ever posted to a feed has produced that.

5. The Persona Mirror — split verdict, and the most interesting result from the tool. The funnel and the room disagreed. By name, roughly ninety percent of registrations read as women. The rooms themselves ran closer to seventy-five or eighty percent (calling a room by sight is its own flawed instrument, hold that number loosely) and the men who came were having some of the day’s most named moments. The reactive-mornings realization came from a man. One of the most interesting questions of the day came from a man. So: the content lands across the audience. The channel filters who registers. Wellness, marketed as an elective, likely reaches women; the same content reaches men when it arrives embedded in their day instead of as a signup. The mirror caught something real. It caught it in the funnel, not the room. The rebuilt personas above are the fix; none of them are drawn along gender lines. I’ve already taken the distribution hypothesis to a men’s wellness professional at a local university to test it.

That finding also marks the instrument’s current edge, so let me name it. The six questions audit the room. The funnel is the door to the room — Part 3’s distribution layer, showing up in the field where the instrument couldn’t see it. The next version gets a seventh question about the door: who can find it, who can afford it, and who the framing quietly turns away. An audit that catches a gap in its own instrument is the instrument working.

6. The Prediction Test — fail. Not failed wrong. Failed unrun. Part 4 says write your predictions down, sealed, before you ship. One week of runway, and the instrument’s own author never asked its final question of her own room. No sealed predictions means every surprise that followed, the staying, the walk-in, the hand-raises, arrived unmeasured against anything. I can tell you I was surprised. I cannot tell you by how much. Next room: predictions written, sealed, opened after.

And one finding landed off the scorecard, because a real audit reports what it wasn’t looking for. During the session, the conversation turned to yoga teacher training, and it made me audit my own seat. So here’s the full accounting. I’ve practiced yoga since I was twelve. I’m in active training now: yoga teacher coursework, hermetics, qigong and intuitive patterns under a master teacher, and a reading practice that never really closes. The knowledge in my room is real. What a room of one cannot do is verify itself. There is no colleague to catch the drift between what I know and what I think I know. So the fix isn’t acquiring knowledge I lack. It’s refusing to let my own depth go unexamined: inviting expert eyes in, and finishing the formal credential so the verification doesn’t rest on my own opinion of myself. A room of one inherits its blind spots at full strength. Including mine. The difference is whether you build in someone to catch them.

Final card: four passes, two split, one failed, one finding off the sheet. The room survived. That’s the accurate word for it. Not prevailed. Survived. And survival with named misses is a start: worth more than a perfect score nobody should believe.

What the Room Had That the Feed Doesn’t

Three mechanisms, all observable in the field:

Presence creates permission. The sentences people said out loud were realizations people rarely come to alone.

The after-session is the session. Eleven of twelve stayed. I had planned to pack up and leave; instead the conversations after both sessions became the actual conversion event — the guide signups, the studio invitation, the follow-up threads. Hard stops would have made the workshops “go well” and produce almost nothing, and I’m happy I reserved extra time after the sessions.

The host reads the room. I read rooms and systems the way some people read cards, and a room is a system running in real time. The hand going up, the person lingering near the banner, the question underneath the question. None of it has a feed equivalent. No dashboard reports it.

What the Container Built

Credit with specifics, because specifics are the only credit that means anything. Atlanta Tech Week built a citywide container that let a solo founder host real rooms inside their program and platform: a public library as venue, the week’s gravity doing promotional work no individual could buy, and an events platform that let a workshop started on a Tuesday be discoverable by Friday. A woman took a paper flyer off a library board and walked into my room because that container existed. That’s infrastructure doing exactly what this series keeps demanding of infrastructure: widening who gets into the room without charging anyone for the width.

Scene Notes for the Next Agent

Findings, not vibes:

Small is a setting, not a limitation. Capping the room was the best composition decision of the week.

Presence converts; feeds filter. Spend accordingly. The feed fills the funnel. The room does everything else.

Budget the seat. Partnership currency is real. But a room that needs expertise and has no partner nearby needs a line item.

Seal your predictions. Or the room can’t teach you what you didn’t know.

The field, meanwhile, is full of rooms. I’ve clocked five from my phone this month alone: lineups, celebration photos, gatherings. Each one legible in seconds once you hold the instrument. Those files stay sealed for now. But the next audits won’t all be mine, and one of them, about a room in this city that got it right, is already in motion. The mission continues.

What you can do to support this week

» Run the diagnostic on your room and report back.

The diagnostic from this report is the mission file from Part 4 — the gate, the six questions, and a gap-to-fix column, on one page. Subscribe and it lands in your inbox. Run it on your room. Mine survived with named misses. Yours will surface its own. That’s not the risk of the diagnostic. That’s the point of it.

The series’ first field audit is live, and the instrument is yours to run. Subscribe and the mission file — the same one-page diagnostic from this report — lands in your inbox.

Subscribe now

// a diagnostic you won’t run on your own room isn’t a diagnostic.

Between Code & Conscience is written by Crystal A. Chubbs — founder, technologist, and The People’s CTO. I write about building technology that doesn’t extract from the people it serves.

More: The People’s CTO · Circuit + Soil

» Start at the beginning

This is a briefing.

By the end of it, you’ll be holding a diagnostic and an assignment. Seven questions. The assignment is one room. The room you’re responsible for. The one you are building, or thinking about building.

You’ve already accepted the mission, or you wouldn’t still be reading.

First, the situation on the ground.

The Situation

Think about the last thing you shipped that worked. The project that launched, the event that filled, the program that came in on time. Now answer honestly: did it work because the room was built for success, or because somebody in it refused to let it fail?

For most of my career, the answer was the second one. My projects succeeded because I decided they would succeed. I stayed when others left. I questioned when others remained silent, even when that meant working around the clock and carrying the stress in my own body. The room got the credit. The launch became evidence that the room was composed correctly. It shipped, didn’t it?

That’s the most dangerous thing about a badly composed room. It doesn’t always produce a visible failure. It produces a person quietly absorbing the gap until the thing ships anyway.

If you read Part 3 and felt like you’d wandered into an engineering review, come back. This one is for you. No stack, no architecture, no technical jargon. This is a set of questions you can ask about any room you’re responsible for: a company, a nonprofit board, a cohort, a conference, a church committee, a one-person business. That’s the whole point of this series. A framework for auditing our rooms that can be applied to every room.

Know the Terrain

Three parts of this series have argued that the rooms we’re building weren’t built for the people they serve — for their customers. Before I hand you the diagnostic, you need to know what it can and can’t see.

A room isn’t only people around a table. It’s every decision surface where someone determines who a thing reaches and how. An artist choosing tour cities is a room. A founder choosing distribution channels is a room. If you make decisions alone, you still have a room. It’s a room of one, and it inherits your blind spots at full strength.

Larger organizations contain many rooms. The team is a room. The speaker list is a room. The price of admission creates the room. I’ve watched a single organization pass this test in one room and fail it in another, in the same month. So be honest about which room you’re actually looking at, because given the opportunity to select, most will pick the flattering one.

And a room can fail two different ways. It can fail to reflect the people it’s building for. Or it can reflect its audience fine while a whole group is missing from where the power and money sit. The questions below will surface both. Don’t let a green check mark on one excuse a failure on the other.

The Gate

Before the diagnostic, one question decides whether anything else can run.

Have you defined who this is for?

Not a demographic bucket. Not a lofty subset with a cool name. A person. In marketing spaces these people are usually referred to as personas, but they are really people. A human with needs, wants, desires and dreams sits on the other side of each decision you make.

If your product, program, event, or organization has no documented answer to who it serves, stop here. Every question below compares your room against that answer, and you can’t measure fidelity to a definition that doesn’t exist.

If you do have an answer, one follow-up: when did you last check it against anyone outside your orbit? Most rooms that have defined their customer defined them by what surrounds them. The people they already know. The customers they already have. The world they already move through, and what makes them feel comfortable in that world.

A definition that has never met a stranger or a challenge isn’t a definition. It’s a mirror.

Passed the gate? Good. Now the case file.

The Case File

Here’s a room, assembled from twenty years of rooms I’ve sat in, serial numbers filed off.

A product team at a mid-size company, building a scheduling app for hourly workers. Nurses, line cooks, warehouse crews. They documented their persona. Her name is Renee. She’s 34, she works two jobs, and she schedules her life on a phone with a cracked screen during a fifteen-minute break. The team is proud of Renee. She’s laminated. She’s on a slide.

Nobody in the room has ever worked an hourly job.

Study this room, because six questions from now, you’re going to run your own. Each question comes with what it surfaces and what the fix costs. The fix is different for every gap, and anyone selling one universal solution is selling a myth.

The Diagnostic

1. The Comfort Question. If Renee walked into this room, would she be comfortable? Not tolerated. Comfortable.

You know this one from the inside. You’ve been Renee in somebody’s room. You had the thing worth saying, you did the math on whether saying it was worth what it would cost, and you didn’t say it. That math is the answer. A room the user needs armor to enter will ship things she has to armor up to use.

The fix costs a meeting: invite her in and ask. Pay her for the answer and for her time.

2. The Cost Question. Renee’s voice is missing. What will that cost, specifically? Make the room say it out loud. Someone ventures: maybe we get the break-time flow wrong. Closer: you’ll build the shift-swap feature around manager approval, because everyone in this room has been the manager. Renee will keep trading shifts by text like she always has, your flagship feature will sit at 4% adoption, and nobody will know why. A missing voice isn’t an abstract gap. It’s a specific future defect with a release date.

The fix costs nothing: name the cost before it arrives. Rooms fix what they’ve predicted, what they can see, and ignore what they haven’t.

3. The Usefulness Question. Is this thing useful for a real need in a real life, or is it entertainment for people who already have everything? Renee’s room passes. I’ve sat in rooms that didn’t. Rooms where money chased a personal aircraft that fits in your garage while the woman serving the coffee couldn’t get her shift covered.

The fix: one paid seat for someone whose daily life depends on the answer.

4. Presence and Power. Count the people in the room from the community you serve. Now the harder count: how many are sponsored, employed, or consulted, versus simply present? Suppose Renee’s team had hired a former shift supervisor who sits in the back of every sprint review. Present. Invited. Never asked. Presence without power is a figurehead.

The fix: attach a budget line to at least one of those seats. Advisors get paid. Focus groups get paid. If nobody is compensated, the fix has failed.

5. The Persona Mirror. This one is almost unfair, because the room wrote its own test and forgot to include them. You documented Renee. You laminated her. Does anyone deciding what ships live anywhere near Renee’s life? Is anyone compensated anything like Renee? This isn’t an external quota. It’s a fidelity test against your own stated artifact. The room said who this is for. The room should agree with itself.

The fix: when someone leaves, recruit the backfill against the persona instead of replacing in kind. No new budget. No new role. Intention applied to a decision you were already making.

6. The Prediction Test. The final exam, and it’s falsifiable. Before shipping, write down the top five complaints Renee will raise. Real predictions, specific, sealed. Ship. Open the envelope. If the room couldn’t call them, the room is missing the person who could have. We’ve watched this room miss all night.

The fix: go find her for the next round, and pay her what the seat is worth.

Notice what none of these ask: your diversity numbers. Counting seats tells you who’s in the photograph. These questions tell you whether the room can do its job. That’s the difference between an audit and an optic.

Notice also what the fixes have in common. Almost none cost money you aren’t already spending. They cost intention at decision points that were passing by unexamined. That’s by design. The most common defense of a failed room is that fixing it is expensive. Mostly, it’s just deliberate — a decision — and the foundation of the tech stack from Part 3.

One more note on the instrument. Part 3 argued that rooms fail in layers: Decision, Physical, Logical, Distribution. The six questions are aimed at those layers. The Gate and the Persona Mirror audit the Decision layer, who this is for and who decides. The Comfort Question and the presence count audit the Physical layer, who is in the room and what it costs them to be there. The power count, the Cost Question, and the Prediction Test audit the Logical layer, who is heard and whose absence becomes a defect. The Distribution layer, the door itself: who can find the room, who can afford it, who the framing quietly turns away. It is the layer this version of the instrument watches for but does not yet formally ask. That question is coming in the next revision. An instrument that knows its own edge is more honest than one that claims to see everything.

The Challenge (What You’ll Be Up Against)

When you run this on a real room, expect resistance, and expect it to be quiet. Here’s the mechanism nobody says out loud: rooms stay narrow because narrowness is comfortable, and real inclusion front-loads the hard conversations. A well-composed room hears the objection in week two instead of the lawsuit in year two. Week two is a trade every sane organization should want, and most avoid, because the person avoiding it is betting they’ll be gone before the bill arrives. Attrition is real and high, especially in tech.

You can watch the avoidance in the pattern of when accountability finally arrives. It arrives after the failure. The scandal breaks, and then a woman is installed as the face of the cleanup. She was available before. The room didn’t want the conversation before. It wanted it after, when the conversation became someone else’s responsibility to solve.

There’s a quieter version of the same move, and you’ve probably watched it happen. An organization gets scrutinized, and suddenly the room diversifies. New hires, new voices, new perspectives in the meeting, and for a while the room genuinely works differently. Then the scrutiny dies down, the article gets buried under newer headlines, and over the next year those same hires are quietly managed out. The room treated its own composition as a public-relations state instead of an operating state. But the voices didn’t stop mattering when the hype subsided. The room just stopped being watched and the failures likely returned.

If you want the pattern with receipts, it has a name. Researchers call it the glass cliff: women are disproportionately promoted into leadership when the organization is already in crisis, because the appointment itself signals change1. In 2014, Mary Barra became the first woman to run a major automaker. Two weeks later, General Motors disclosed an ignition-switch defect its own rooms had known about, and misclassified, for roughly a decade2. She sat before Congress to answer for decisions made in rooms she hadn’t led3. The eventual bill: a $900 million federal criminal settlement4, $120 million to the states,5 a victim fund of over half a billion, and more than one hundred deaths6.

Running this diagnostic early is how you have the cheap version of that conversation instead of the expensive one later. Running it repeatedly is how you keep the room composed when nobody is looking. A room that only holds its shape under scrutiny was never well-composed. It was posing.

Two objections will come up. Have your answers ready.

“This is just quotas with extra steps.” I’m not a diversity metrics person. I have no training in that and no desire to acquire it. What I know is product success, and this is a different lens on it. Every question above is a question about whether your work will hold up in the hands of the people it’s for. If that’s a quota, so is user research. And if that lens offends you, I might recommend sitting with that feeling of tension to understand its origins.

“We don’t have the budget.” You have attrition. Every departure is a free composition decision. Recruit the backfill differently and the room changes without a single new dollar. The resource constraint is real; it just isn’t the constraint for this model.

The Other Room

I want to tell you what it looks like when this works, because I opened this briefing in the room most of us know, and I don’t want to leave you there.

In a well-composed room, the launch review has no hero. There is no story about the person who caught it at the last minute, because nothing needed catching. The complaint that would have blindsided you surfaced in week two, raised by the person you paid to be there, and it got fixed while it was still cheap. Nobody worked through the weekend to cover a gap the room couldn’t see. The thing shipped, and everyone who built it was still whole on the other side.

In my 20 years in product and technology, I have had the pleasure, a few times, of being in these rooms. And the energy is almost electric. It’s asking a question and having it answered by a different perspective. It’s writing a requirement and hearing a story from someone who worked on a different team in a different organization and how they handled it. It’s building an alliance with someone who doesn’t look like you and maybe doesn’t fully understand you, but who sees your value and experience as inspiring.

And here is the part I need you to hear: that room is not a bigger budget or a better company. It’s a series of small decisions, made on purpose. The backfill. The advisory seat. The question asked before the ship date instead of after. The in-community field testing that every product, every release and every sprint deserves. Every one of them was available to the failed room too. The challenge is that no one chose them.

Your Assignment

So here’s the mission: fixing the world’s rooms, one room at a time, starting with the one you can actually reach.

One room. Yours. This week. Run the gate, run the six questions, and write down what they surface. Awareness is a legitimate first step, and if that’s all you do this week, that’s not nothing. That’s the first decision.

Your equipment is one page: the gate, the six questions, and a gap-to-fix column to write in. It’s built to be printed and carried into an actual meeting — your meeting.

This framework is headed for bigger rooms, too. It's up for a live session vote at SXSW 2027.

What you can do to support this week

» Run the diagnostic on your room and report back.

The mission file — the one-page diagnostic from this briefing — is available to subscribers. It’s free to download.

Subscribe now

Subscribe and it unlocks right here, and everything that comes after this series lands in your inbox.

// a room that ships isn’t proof the room worked. sometimes it’s proof someone paid for it.

Between Code & Conscience is written by Crystal A. Chubbs — founder, technologist, and The People’s CTO. I write about building technology that doesn’t extract from the people it serves.

More: The People’s CTO · Circuit + Soil

» Read part 3

/* Today’s oracle: The Default · The Stack · 02

Second card in the Stack series.

I am up for a panel vote to host another room for SXSW 2027. Your vote helps me get there.

Technomancer Tuesdays lean hardest into the bridge between the technical and the human. */

Upright — a setting you chose. You opened the panel, read what was there, and decided. It may look identical to the default. It isn’t, because you know why it’s set that way.

Reversed — a setting chosen for you, that you never checked. It came this way. It has been running the whole time. The question was never whether it works. It’s whether anyone asked what it was for.

Every system ships with defaults. Most people never open the panel.

Rooms have them too — who gets invited, who speaks, what counts as qualified, whose feedback counts as data. Nobody chose most of those. They were inherited, never audited, and they’ve been running the whole time.

That’s the argument behind the session I’ve put up for SXSW 2027: “Stop Counting Seats. Start Designing Better Rooms.” Excluding the people you’re building for isn’t a diversity problem. It’s a user research problem — a failure by the professional standards we already claim to hold, not just the moral ones.

Community voting decides what gets programmed, and it closes Sunday, August 23. Voting takes two minutes: create a free PanelPicker account (it’s quick and that’s the whole cost), search the session title, and hit the vote arrow. Heart the session here.

// it came this way. it has been running this way the whole time.

/* Today’s oracle: The Stack Reversed.

Some Tuesdays I post something from the edge where technology and intuition meet. Welcome to my new series. */

Paid subscribers saw this first in my Favorite Tech Resources piece from July 14th. Sharing it with everyone today.

I worked with Claude to port the oracle deck, referenced above, to my site. It’s posted at thepeoplescto.io/oracle if you’d like to draw a card yourself. A good prompt does what a good question does, it stops you long enough to remember that you already have the answers.

That’s the same thing I’m doing when I audit a room, or a stack, or a decision. Pull the thing out of the background. Look at it directly. Name it.

It’s also gotten me thinking about building my own deck. Something built for the threshold — for the people standing between the life they have and the one they’re building, who speak both languages and haven’t found a tool that speaks back.

Not a promise. Just a thought I’m following.

—

Action Needed

» Go draw a card. Tell me what you got.

And if you were building an oracle deck for people who work in technology — what card would you want in it?

// the deck was never the point. the question was.

Some Tuesdays I post something from the edge where technology and intuition meet. Welcome to my new series.

/* Today’s oracle: The Stack, Reversed.

Your technology is a stack. Your morning’s a stack. Your business is a stack. The question isn’t whether there are gaps — it’s whether anyone’s positioned to catch them before they compound.

Technomancer describes a person who blends the supernatural with advanced technology. Technomancer Tuesdays lean hardest into the bridge between the technical and the human. */

I wrote that yesterday about tech stacks — the four layers underneath everything you touch, and what happens when the gaps in each one happen to line up.

But it isn’t only about products. Every morning is a stack too. Sleep is the foundation. Food and water sit on top of it. Movement, then attention, then whatever you were actually trying to do with the day.

Miss one layer and you adjust. Bad night’s sleep, more coffee, you push through it. That’s a normal Tuesday.

Miss enough of them and the day fails the same way a product does — not because of the last thing that went wrong, but because nothing underneath it was holding the cracks.

The reversal isn’t a warning. It’s a question about where you’re standing right now.

In this case, the voice is the inner signals from your body.

// a missing voice doesn't guarantee failure. it raises the odds — and uncaught odds compound.

» Come build your First Hour, a morning that belongs to you

I am hosting a free LIVE ‘Build Your First Hour System’ workshop on Maven Wednesday at 6 PM ET.

» Part 3 of The Room Has Failed series released yesterday

Background

Have you ever been the only person in the room who has the experience to stop something from unfolding in catastrophe? Maybe once. Maybe repeatedly, if you’re someone who recognizes patterns. Not because you were the sharpest person in the room, but because of something you knew or some experience you had that nobody else in that room had any reason to know.

Maybe they fixed it. Maybe it shipped anyway. Either way, you learned something that doesn’t show up in any retro. The catch wasn’t skill alone. It was the right voice in the right room at the right time, and nothing about that room’s design meant for you to be there.

Now envision a different room. The bug wasn’t in the code. It was in the room where someone decided that voice didn’t need handling. By the time it reached production it looked like an engineering problem. It had stopped being one four layers earlier.

This is the room I’ve spent two pieces evaluating. What I haven’t said yet is that the room isn’t a subject on its own. It’s the foundation layer of a tech stack, in the most literal sense of the term. The gap that room leaves behind travels upward through everything built on top of it.

A quick definition, before we go further: a tech stack is the full set of layers that make up a piece of technology, from the physical device in your hand to the software running on it. Your phone is a stack. So is your laptop, the app you check first thing in the morning. And these layers make up a full stack.

Most people never think about the layers underneath the thing they’re touching. That’s exactly the point.

The Failure Stack Defined

^{“The Swiss cheese model of accident causation” by Doveroftke, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0}

Before going layer by layer, here’s the shape of the whole thesis. Every layer of a tech stack has its own holes. Its own place where the wrong assumption gets built in and goes unnoticed. A single hole in a single layer is normal. Products ship with gaps; that’s what iteration is for. The room fails when the holes across every layer happen to line up, and nobody was positioned to notice until it was too late to fix. In aviation and medicine this is called the Swiss cheese model, from James Reason’s work on accident causation1. I’ve started running it as a test on my own rooms and decisions.

The Decision Layer. The rooms and backlogs where scope, budget and priority get set. The hole here isn’t a bug, it’s an assumption nobody was positioned to question. Everything built above it inherits that assumption.

The Physical Layer. The device itself: hardware, sensors, and the firmware running underneath them. The hole here is calibration, meaning whatever the machine was tuned to treat as normal. It ships inside the object and can’t be patched out later.

The Logical Layer. The software, the applications, and increasingly the AI making judgment calls inside them. The hole here is the logic itself, a rule that works for the person it was written around and quietly misfires for everyone else. It executes at scale, identically, every time.

The Distribution Layer. Marketing, pricing, channel, and who ever finds out a product exists. The hole here is reach. A product can clear every layer below it and still never arrive. It can also leave demographics out of the conversation completely, which is a quieter failure with the same consequences.

A hole in one layer is survivable. Holes that line up across four are not.

The Decision Layer

The stack is bookended by two people layers, the decision layer and the distribution layer. The decision layer is the one that should be least controversial, because it’s obvious: whoever’s building the thing is the one making the decisions about the thing. That’s not a diversity statement. It’s how organizations work.

Which means the composition of that room isn’t a side condition. It’s an input. And inputs show up in outputs.

The data bears this out in the most unglamorous way possible, as a business outcome rather than a values statement. A 2018 Boston Consulting Group study of approx. 1,700 company teams found that organizations with more diverse leadership reported meaningfully higher innovation-related revenue: companies scoring above average on diversity drove 45 percent of their revenue from product innovation, compared to 26 percent for companies scoring below average2.

That’s not a headcount number. It’s an output number, measured in revenue.

And here’s the part that’s easy to miss. I call it the khaki pants and blue button-up dilemma.

This isn’t only about who gets excluded. A 2025 peer-reviewed paper in PNAS argues that rigid structures constrain the people they appear to privilege, too: men are compelled toward narrow, dominant roles rather than genuine choice, even as those same structures elevate their status3.

The room that only ever hires one kind of person isn’t just failing the people it left out. It’s quietly deciding, for everyone inside it, who they’re allowed to be at work. Easing that rigidity is positive-sum, not zero-sum. The system is costing everyone something, just differently.

This isn’t limited to boardrooms, either. Think about the last time a smart appliance, a refrigerator or a washing machine, actually asked a person who does the most cooking and cleaning in a home what they’d need it to do. My guess is that very few companies building those products consult those groups in a meaningful way, and it shows in what gets built.

The Physical Layer

Now the layer most people never think about: hardware. You know you’re using a phone, not what’s inside it. But hardware carries some of the clearest documented evidence of what happens when a room’s blind spot becomes physical.

Picture a C-suite executive taking a photo on his phone. It comes out blurry, poorly rendered, wrong. He sends a short, frustrated email: why am I blurry in this picture? I can see the escalation path that follows, because I’ve worked inside environments where that email lands. Someone reroutes it. Someone explains. Someone eventually fixes it. The fact that it took his email to surface it says everything.

And the history is real. From the 1940s onward, Kodak calibrated its film using reference photos of a white model, tuning color balance and exposure to her skin tone as the default. Darker skin was often poorly rendered or lost detail entirely, a bias that didn’t stay in the film era. Digital sensors and computational photography inherited the same default-to-lightness calibration. Google won a Cannes Lions Grand Prix in 2022 for Real Tone, its initiative to stop cameras from over-brightening deeper skin. TECNO built a dedicated imaging lab and custom sensors for the same problem. Both are real engineering. Both are also praise for correcting something that should have been baseline from the start.4

Here’s the detail worth sitting with. Kodak didn’t fix this because of decades of complaints from the people it was failing. Kodak had heard from families about graduation photos. That wasn't what moved them. They fixed it because two of their biggest commercial clients, a chocolate company and a furniture company, complained that their products weren’t rendering accurately in dark tones.

The standard U.S. crash test dummy, developed in 1978, was modeled on a 5’9”, 171-pound man. Women are 73 percent more likely to be seriously injured in a comparable frontal crash. A genuinely female-anatomical dummy wasn’t introduced into U.S. regulatory testing until 2003, decades after manufacturers first requested one. In fact, a dummy built on female anatomy, rather than a scaled-down male one, still isn’t standard5. In November 2025, the Department of Transportation finally released a design for one, with over 150 sensors and anatomically accurate neck, collarbone, pelvis, and legs. It hasn’t been adopted. Some automakers have objected that it may exaggerate injury risk and undercut the apparent value of existing safety features.

Firmware sits just above the hardware, and most people have never heard of it. It’s the code that runs the physical components themselves. Voice assistants are a clean example. It runs on a dedicated always-on chip, invisible until it repeatedly fails to hear you. Speech recognition performs measurably worse for certain accents and dialects, and wake-word detection is the gate: if it fails, the request never reaches transcription at all6.

A firmware gap doesn’t announce itself as a bug. It quietly decides whose voice counts.

The Logical Layer

Above the physical layer sits the logical one: software, applications, and increasingly the AI systems making judgment calls inside them. The shift matters. Hardware fails passively: the sensor doesn’t see you, and nobody decided that. Software fails actively: someone or something wrote a condition, and you’re on the wrong side of it.

I watched one of these happen firsthand. Before any formal conversation, I observed that a client’s product had no defined path for how urgent information reached the people who needed to act on it. No protocol, no trigger, just a list of numbers to call. That’s a missing layer, not a missing feature, and it’s the kind of gap a room only catches if someone in it has operated under pressure.

The scale of this is worse than most people assume. A February 2026 analysis of the top one million home pages found that 95.9 percent have detectable accessibility failures, averaging 56 errors per page. That’s up from 94.8 percent the year before, reversing six straight years of slow improvement. Six failure categories account for 96 percent of all errors, and they’ve been the same six for eight years running7.

And accessibility isn’t only about disability. If one of your personas is a seventy-five-year-old woman who can’t read her phone without her glasses, does your software account for her? These failures are rarely dramatic. They’re small, repeated, and easy to overlook. Over time they quietly decide who stays and who gives up.

Then there’s AI, the layer’s newest addition and its clearest evidence.

A 2019 peer-reviewed study in Science found that a widely used U.S. hospital algorithm, one affecting an estimated 200 million people a year, systematically assigned Black patients lower risk scores than white patients with the same level of illness. Nothing malicious was in the code. The algorithm used healthcare cost as a stand-in for health need, without accounting for the fact that Black patients have historically received less care spending for the same conditions8.

Correcting it would have increased the share of Black patients flagged for extra care from 17.7 percent to 46.5 percent. That was 2019, and by current standards it was a simple system. Someone could open it, find the substitution, and name it: cost was standing in for need.

That inspection is getting harder. The AI systems now making these calls are trained on data no one fully audits, and the reasoning behind a given output often can’t be traced back to a rule anyone wrote. The failure mode hasn’t changed. A proxy stands in for the real thing, and it holds until it meets someone the proxy was never built around.

What’s changed is where it can be caught. When you could read the logic, the logic was the checkpoint. When you can’t, the room is.

The Distribution Layer

This is the other people layer, and the last one. Marketing, pricing, and channel decide whether any of this ever reaches the people it was built for. It has its own Goodhart’s Law problem, right there in the metrics that get treated as success. When a measure becomes the target, it stops measuring what it was meant to measure9. I asked a version of this question in May: these are machine words applied to human behavior, so what happens if we replace them? Here’s the answer I’ve been building since.

A product can be well-built at every layer below and still only ever reach people who already look like the room that made it. Price it where only one group can afford it, launch it in channels only one group reads, and the reach question was answered before anyone asked it.

"The metric isn't the number. The metric is the human behind the number"

— Between Code & Conscience, May 2026.

Every metric below is a real business metric, in wide use, right now. And every one of them can be quietly rewritten into what it’s actually measuring about a human being:

No one sets out to build the left column. But it’s what gets measured, because it’s cheap, easy to count and lucrative. A room that never asked who this actually needs to reach won’t think to ask the question on the right, either.

Diagnosis Is Done

Four layers, four kinds of hole and one pattern underneath all of them: a room that never widened produces a gap nobody in it was positioned to catch.

None of this is rare. None of it requires a villain. None of it is unfixable.

But here’s the part that actually matters, and it’s why the layers had to be laid out one at a time. A missing perspective at any single layer doesn’t guarantee that layer fails. It raises the odds. A decision made on a narrow assumption might still be fine. A sensor calibrated to one kind of body might never meet the other kind. A rule written for one user might not misfire often enough to notice.

The failure isn’t the hole. Products ship with holes. The failure is a hole nobody caught, sitting under another hole nobody caught, under another one. Four layers of raised odds, none of them checked, all of them compounding, until something reaches a person and does exactly what it was never meant to do.

That’s the whole model. Not perfection. No one expects a first version to be right. What’s missing is protocol: a way to check, at each layer, whether the decisions being made there are structurally sound before the next layer gets built on top.

And when someone does catch a gap, they shouldn’t pay for it. The executive with the blurry photo wasn’t a villain for asking. Neither is the person who notices something because it happened to affect them directly. There’s a name for making people carry that cost: the cultural tax, sometimes the diversity tax, the informal unpaid work of catching what a narrower room couldn’t see, on top of your actual job.

The fix was never assigning someone to represent an entire demographic. It’s simpler. Someone was in the building, doing something unrelated to their role, and happened to be in the loop early enough to catch it.

Organizational research has a name for what makes that possible: psychological safety10. Teams where people can raise concerns without fear of punishment catch and fix failures earlier. Teams that punish the person who speaks up don’t eliminate the problem. They delay it, and it gets worse.

Shipping an imperfect first version isn’t the failure. That’s what a first version is for. The failure is not knowing the gap existed, and then choosing silence over a plain “we know, and here’s our timeline.” A company that does the second thing well is demonstrating competence, not confessing to a scandal.

Knowing the shape of the failure isn’t the same as knowing what to do about it. That comes in Part 4.

// a missing voice doesn’t guarantee failure. it raises the odds — and uncaught odds compound.

Between Code & Conscience is written by Crystal A. Chubbs — founder, technologist, and The People’s CTO. I write about building technology that doesn’t extract from the people it serves.

More: The People’s CTO · Circuit + Soil

What you can do to support this week

» I’d like to start a conversation.

Pick one thing you’re building or leading. Walk the four layers against it. Not to find someone to blame, just to see whether anyone in the room is positioned to catch a gap at each one.

Leave a comment

If you want to do that with other people who are building, “we build” runs Fridays at 7PM ET on TikTok or follow the build on The People’s CTO.

/* Today’s oracle: The Room, Reversed.

Myopic rooms produce flawed results. In today’s article, I will be using a product management method called storywriting. Stories are the translation layer between user problems and net new functionality and fixes.

Technomancer describes a person who blends magic or supernatural forces with advanced technology. Technomancer Tuesdays lean hardest into the bridge between the technical and the human. */

In product management, talking to your users isn’t optional. It’s the foundation of everything that ships. Build without them, and you’ve already failed.

Somehow, we’ve normalized building institutions, policies, and technology without the people they’re designed to serve in the room. We call that a diversity problem. I call it a failure. It’s a user research problem. Who are you building for? If the room doesn’t reflect the answer, the room has failed. If the room reflects the answer, but the room is one-dimensional, the room has failed because the perception of who is needed is flawed — not by moral standards, but by the same professional standards we already hold ourselves to in product and technical spaces.

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The Failure Is Never Dramatic

It rarely looks like a villain. Nobody sits in a meeting and decides to exclude anyone on purpose. It looks smaller than that, and quieter. A feature nobody asked for. A policy written for a user who doesn’t exist. A tool that solves the builder’s problem instead of the user’s needs, because the builder was the only perspective in the room for the discussing and decisioning.

In product management, we have a name for skipping this step: we call it building on assumptions instead of research. We know what happens next. The thing ships, and it’s wrong in ways nobody predicted, because nobody who would have predicted the weak spots was ever asked.

The Room That Almost Shipped Broken

At a former company, I sat in a meeting where we were preparing to deploy a new digital ordering platform. It hadn’t been tested at the operational level. Not with restaurant associates who would have to use it. Not with the store ops or tech ops teams who’d actually have to support it. I asked a simple question: had we tested this with the operators?

The room went quiet. The answer was no. At that time I was leading the frontend digital ordering product, but my background is in operations and emergency response. A value I brought to the room based on my experience.

We were moving forward anyway, which meant a brand-new digital platform would have to integrate cleanly with an older point-of-sale, menu and pricing system on launch day, untested. I asked partly because that’s how my mind works, and partly because I’d come up through operational roles earlier in my career and knew exactly what could go wrong at the seam of two technologies expected to just work. So we got on a call with store ops. We found real problems with how products and menu items were configured. Then we tested in an actual restaurant, and found more — menu items displaying incorrectly on the point-of-sale system and on the employee-facing kiosk. All of it got fixed before launch, because someone asked the question first.

For context: I was the only Black person in that room who worked in tech, product, or brand and one of the only women. The room was mostly male, mostly white, an outsourced Ukrainian development team and a small group of onshore Asian representatives. If I hadn’t been in that room, I don’t think anyone would have asked. And I am certain the deployment would have gone out broken, on a project with real money and real risk behind it, for a multi-billion dollar global organization.

That’s the whole discipline, reduced to one sentence. It isn’t complicated. It’s just often skipped in the rooms where the decisions are made.

Everything Is a Product

Here’s the reframe I actually want you to take from this: everything is a product, whether anyone in the room is calling it that or not. An app is a product. A support system is a product. A wellness program, a community strategy, a school policy, a course built for students of technology, a nonprofit intake process — all of it is something built for someone, meant to be used by someone, and every discipline that governs good product development applies whether or not the word “product” ever gets said out loud.

You don’t need the title to use the tools. A user story is nothing more than a sentence that forces clarity: who is this for, what do they need, and why. In plain terms:

AS A [the person this is actually for]
I WANT [what they need it to do]
SO THAT [the actual outcome they’re after]

You could run this against a support hotline, a diversity initiative, a wellness retreat, or a piece of software, and the sentence would still hold. It’s not a developer’s tool. It’s a clarity tool, and clarity is available to anyone willing to ask the question before they build, especially those building rooms where decisions are made.

If a room can’t produce a sentence like that honestly, it’s worth asking why.

IN the Room Isn’t the Same as AT the Table

There’s a second kind of room failure, quieter than the first, and it’s the one I actually think about most. A room can have the right people physically present and still fail, if presence isn’t the same as power. Someone in the room to observe isn’t the same as someone in the room to decide. Someone consulted after the direction is already set isn’t the same as someone sponsored to help set it.

I’ve been in rooms where I was the right voice at the wrong altitude — present, but not positioned to actually change the outcome, or, even worse, changing the outcome required a fight that often didn’t pay off. That’s its own kind of user research failure, just one level up: leadership skipped the step of asking whether the people they’d already included had any real authority to shape what got built.

If you’re building a room right now, the question isn’t only “who’s in it.” It’s whether the people in it are sponsored, employed, and consulted, or just present. Those are three different levels of inclusion, and only one of them actually changes what ships. What if one seat creates big change, or big cost savings in avoided failed starts? Imagine how that compounds as more voices multiply and coalesce.

The Question Costs You Nothing to Ask

I’m not going to hand you a list of examples of who got this wrong, because that’s not really the point, and it lets you off the hook too easily by making this about someone else’s room instead of yours. So here’s the actual ask.

Sit down with whatever you’re building or leading right now. A product, a program, a policy, a cohort, a class, a company. Ask the same question I asked in that meeting, or just ask the question to yourself if you haven’t quite found your voice: have we actually tested this with the people it’s for? Not “would they probably be fine with it.” Tested. Present. In the room, in the process, before launch, and most importantly sponsored, employed, and consulted.

If the honest answer is no, you already know what to do next. It’s the same thing product management has always asked of good builders. Go find them. Go meet them where they are.

This is the first real dive into a series I’m building on this idea. Next, we go deeper into the mechanics — how failure shows up in the actual layers of the technology stack, not just the room around it. After that, we bring it together into something usable: a way to actually apply this to your own room, and fix what you find.

Are you sitting in these types of rooms today? Next time, I will share another room where decisions are being made without input from the voices that matter.

// build without them, and you’ve already failed.

Between Code & Conscience is written by Crystal A. Chubbs — founder, technologist, and The People’s CTO. I write about building technology that doesn’t extract from the people it serves.

More: The People’s CTO · Circuit + Soil

What you can do to support this week

» I’d like to start a conversation.

This is the first real dive into a series I’m building on this idea.

// tell me about a room. yours, a city council meeting, a staff meeting, anywhere that didn’t reflect who it was supposed to serve. reply and tell me about it.

Leave a comment

» Read the first part of the series.

You know this meeting. Something is about to ship — a product, a policy, a program — and you can see the problem coming, because you’re the only person in the room who has ever lived on the receiving end of it. You’ve done the math on whether saying it is worth what it will cost you. Maybe you said it anyway. Maybe you didn’t, and you watched it ship wrong exactly the way you knew it would, and then you sat through the retro where everyone was mystified.

Nobody named the cause. So I will: unrepresentative rooms ship weaker products. The room failed. Not you. The room.

Running the Audit on Rooms

I spend most of my working hours auditing systems for a living: interfaces, booking flows, approval processes, the small infrastructural decisions that determine whether a well-intentioned space functions the way it intends, or just the way it claims. Somewhere in the last few months, I started running the same audit on rooms. Not the metaphorical kind. The literal ones: conference rooms, boardrooms, community spaces, panels, cohorts, staff photos.

And what I noticed is that the diversity conversation, as practiced today, is asking a question I’m no longer willing to spend energy answering. It asks why diversity matters, again and again, cycle after cycle, as though the case still needs to be made. It audits metrics. It counts seats. It negotiates percentages.

Every round of that negotiation concedes the premise that a reflective room is the exception that must be argued for, rather than the baseline any room claiming to serve people should have started from.

The Standard

So here is the standard I am manifesting, and it does not require a debate. A room should reflect the society it exists inside and the communities it serves. If the people a room serves are not present in it, or at minimum structurally heard, the room has failed. Not “let’s circle back on the metrics.” Not “let’s revisit our diversity goals.” Failed.

The arithmetic is what makes the failure visible, so let’s do it once. Women are roughly half the world. Sum the global majority — Africa and its diaspora, Latin America, South and Southeast Asia, Indigenous populations on every continent — and the reflective room worldwide is half women and majority people of color. Local rooms would mirror local populations. Global rooms would mirror the world.

Hold that picture next to the rooms we sit in every day.

They are the thing that needs explaining, and we have spent decades explaining the wrong side of the equation. The numbers aren’t the standard. The numbers are the evidence that the standard was never met. I will no longer be participating in that debate.

There’s an energetic argument underneath the structural one. Every time we frame this as women fighting for a seat, as people of color petitioning for access, as a case to be re-made, we reinforce the deficit we’re trying to close. As a student of patterns and energy, I’m done putting that language into the world. The failed room is the deviation. The standard doesn’t need defending. The rooms need redesigning.

Where the Failure Compounds

Nowhere does this failure compound harder than in technology, because technology is where the fewest rooms build for the most people.

A handful of companies build the tools most of society runs on. The knowledge to manufacture advanced chips lives almost entirely in one region of the world. I’m not litigating trade policy. I’m asking a design question: how could a room in one context possibly know, unaided, what an impoverished Latin American mother of three in America needs from the technology in her hand?

At the hardware layer, maybe the cost of that distance is modest. But the distance doesn’t stay at the hardware layer. It compounds upward — through software, applications, algorithms, and now the assumptions built into AI tools. A stack of failed rooms, each inheriting the blind spots of the one below it, shipped into everyone’s pocket and most small businesses. And all of that happens before anyone asks how the finished thing gets distributed: who it reaches, and who it skips.

In product management, my discipline for twenty years, building without insight from your user base is a cardinal sin. It’s the first thing you learn and the first question asked when something fails: did you talk to your customers? Yet we have built entire societies where the rooms that design everything consult almost no one they design for, and the results ship globally anyway.

The diversity debate treats this as a values conversation. It’s a quality conversation.

Every properly trained product manager knows this. Somewhere along the way, we stopped applying the knowledge to society itself.

What It Looks Like Up Close

I didn’t arrive at this in the abstract, and I didn’t arrive at it recently. Across two decades in corporate rooms I was oftentimes “the only.” The category rotated: the only woman, the only person of color, the only Black person in a room of colleagues from India, sometimes the only American. Being the only rarely changed. People who spend their careers among people who look like them never have to collect this data. I collected it in every meeting I sat in.

What I did with it is where how I think matters as much as what I experienced. I never once took those rooms as evidence about me. Not “I’m not likable.” Not “I didn’t make the case well.” I treated them as systems with observable rules and engineered around the rules: learned when to ask the question myself and when to route it through a colleague the room would hear, learned which framing moved a decision and which died on contact. Every workaround I built was documentation. A record of a room that didn’t work.

The framework came later. The dataset came first. And once the framework existed, the audit turned inward to my own business: the first system I caught failing the people it claims to welcome was mine.

I publish a free guide for people who want a calmer relationship with their devices. It goes out by email: sign up, click, download. Testing it on my own setup, the link returned a 404. The platform wraps every link in a tracking redirect, and the privacy protection in my browser strips the tracking, which breaks the redirect. The readers most likely to hit that wall are the ones who have already turned their protection on: the people most aligned with what the guide is for. I can’t tell you how many of them there were. A broken link doesn’t file a complaint.

I caught it early, and not by luck. Two decades of shipping things taught me to test the whole path, not just the happy one, and I use privacy-protecting tools on purpose, so I was standing where a careful reader would stand. This happens constantly, on every platform, to every builder. If you don’t have the visibility, the experience, or someone who can work through it with you, it doesn’t get caught. It stays in production.

No villain anywhere in that loop. The system is the case study. That’s what most room failures look like: not exclusion by decision, but exclusion by default, running quietly under a person’s best intentions.

You’ve probably watched a version of this too. It may even be the pending failure you couldn’t name in that meeting.

Your Room

That places me in the pattern as one data point, not the center. I left a stable two-decade career to build at the intersection of technology, wellness, and culture — no institutional funding, no cohort of peers who look like me in the rooms where capital gets allocated. It’s why I build the way I do now: small rooms, composed on purpose, translation layers built by hand because the default ones didn’t exist. The same structural pattern I’m describing, one layer downstream, in the rooms where the next generation of rooms gets built.

Most small businesses never have a CTO. Most people never have anyone in their corner whose job is to look at the systems they live inside, the devices, the defaults, the rooms, the body running all of it, and ask whether those systems are serving them or spending them. That gap is why I write, and it’s why I took the title. Someone should be in the room on our behalf.

A woman I’ve worked with, who avoided nearly every piece of technology in her life until a few weeks ago, described herself to me recently as a strobe light in the sky, looking for like-minded people. She meant it literally: visible and searching at the same time, hoping someone scanning the horizon happens to be looking her way when the light passes over.

That is what a failed room does to the people it excludes. It doesn’t just leave them out. It leaves them signaling into a sky that was never designed to look back.

And to be clear, I mean your room. Not the industry’s rooms in the abstract. Not the one you sat in last year. The room you are building right now: the team, the cohort, the board, the platform, the community. Stand in the doorway and look at it. If it does not reflect the community and the society around it, it has failed. Not eventually. Now. And because the room is yours, so is the redesign.

When I first wrote this, that was where it ended: a standard and a charge. Since then, this became a series, and the charge became a mission. The argument starts here. The instrument is waiting in Part 4.

Part 2 turns the standard into a test any builder can run.

Part 3 follows the failure down through the layers of the technology stack, with the receipts.

Part 4 hands you the diagnostic and the assignment: one room, yours, this week.

Part 5 turns the instrument on my own rooms.

Part 6 finds one that got it right.

// the room has failed. look at yours. i started on mine. let’s build new spaces together.

Between Code & Conscience is written by Crystal A. Chubbs — founder, technologist, and The People’s CTO. I write about building technology that doesn’t extract from the people it serves.

More: The People’s CTO · Circuit + Soil

If this series is resonating, the best way to support it is to share it with one person building something small.

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The mission file — the one-page room diagnostic from this series — comes with a subscription. Paid subscribers also receive the Founder's Journal, honest notes from the founder path, so you're not walking it alone.

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Greetings. You found the signal.

You have a feeling about the technology you use, and it’s correct. It wasn’t built for you.

Not for you specifically. Not with you in the room. The tool you were told would save time is spending you instead. The default you never chose is costing you something you never agreed to. The meeting where your project’s fate got decided happened somewhere you weren’t.

I know why. I was in those rooms for twenty years.

Technology gets decided by whoever is standing there when the decision gets made. When that room doesn’t hold the people who have to live with the result, what it produces isn’t malice. It’s absence. And the first thing to go missing is the body: the one that gets tired, overstimulated, interrupted, and pulled away from its own life by a product optimizing for something else entirely.

Your body was the original technology. Everything built since has been trying to catch up, and most of it has forgotten what it was catching up to.

So that’s the work. I read the rooms. I audit the systems. I write down what I find. And then I help others find their way.

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I’m Crystal A. Chubbs. I spent twenty years as the only — the only woman, the only person of color, sometimes the only American — in the enterprise rooms where technology gets decided. The Home Depot. Amazon. Macy’s. Systems used by millions, shipped from rooms most people never see inside.

Here’s what those rooms taught me. Every technical decision has someone missing from it. The small business signing a software contract nobody on staff can evaluate. The person accepting defaults nobody chose. Somebody should be in those rooms on their behalf.

That’s the seat I built. I operate as The People’s CTO, because most small businesses never have one, and most people never have anyone asking whether their systems serve them or spend them.

This is where that work gets written down. One conviction underneath all of it: technology and wellbeing are not opposites, and anyone who says you must choose is selling you the extraction. Your body was the original technology. Everything since has been trying to catch up.

Some weeks that’s a field report from a real room. Some weeks it’s a system review, or the Workaround Economy, or the honest log of building Circuit + Soil without a cohort, a fund, or a net.

Where to go from here:

The Room — Six parts on who’s in the rooms where technology gets decided, who isn’t, and what that costs. Rooms fail by default. They prevail on purpose. Start at Part 1.

Audits — Systems reviewed with the verdict included. The Workaround Economy lives here: the routes people build when the official path was never built for them.

The Oracle — Technomancer Tuesdays. Pattern work, read out loud.

The Founder — The parts of building a company that don’t make the pitch deck.

The People’s Build — What gets built when someone asks who it’s for first. Coming.

What to expect

Essays arrive in your inbox and they’re free. Always.

Once a month I write the Founder’s Journal: the record of building this company, with the reasoning left in. What it cost and what it gave, in roughly that order. That one is for paid subscribers, along with the mission file, the one-page room diagnostic from the series. It’s there when you’re ready.

If you want one place to start, start with The Room. It’s the argument everything else sits on. The six-part series that started it all. Rooms fail by default. They prevail on purpose.

Subscribe now

One more thing, if you have a second.

I’d like to know how you floated into my orbit [subscription required to vote].

// signal received. see you in the next log.

Start inward

I would start inward when thinking about technology as a resource. Remembering that our minds and bodies are the original technology is powerful.

Once we’ve established that your mind and body are the greatest technology, there are so many amazing tools on the market.

The tools

I’ll start with one of my personal favorites: Anthropic’s Claude. This is a company where the hype and the almost-trillion-dollar valuation are reflective of the product offering. Claude is branded as “a thinking partner,” and it’s been just that for me. Its models and execution are leaps and bounds above OpenAI — especially in the space of building and creating.

Right now, Claude’s most powerful model, Fable 5, is available to paid subscribers to try through July 19. Now would be a great time to try it out. It’s also a company co-founded and led in part by a woman, Daniela Amodei (which I lightly track as a barometer).

I’ll give you an example of why I enjoy Claude. I’ve built a v1 business automation that tracks notes and tasks and leverages those in every response. As part of it, Claude knows largely how I think, my goals, future products, and many other aspects of my business and who I am. This includes my need to step away from my business, because I will work nonstop for 14+ hours a day (especially if I’m in build mode). The other day I wanted something “light” to do at 2ish AM, and I asked Claude for a recommendation. Unprompted, Claude built a working oracle deck. Initially I was surprised, because I’d specifically asked for a lightweight business task, but I decided to play along. The cards were anything but random. The first card drawn was The Honorable Yawn: “The most productive thing left today is sleep, and it requires no effort at all.” Claude took the aspects of my user constellation and created a tool perfectly suited to tell me to go to bed and rest — which is exactly what I advocate for and am an avid supporter of, with my clients, users, and followers. And quite frankly, it worked. I laughed, logged the response, and then rested — even if a little begrudgingly.

The creator economy

If you mean creator as in the creator economy, I recommend finding a content creator or expert you resonate with, and intentionally following their content, challenges, and techniques. There are a few TikTok creators that I find particularly inspiring. A few of my favorites are @lana.k.social, @aaronlrose, @digitalstoryacademy, @kennovate, and @solipsigma. I find this group hopeful and inspiring for those of us who might be a little more reluctant on the influencer part of the creating, building, and founding journey.

Productivity and integration

If you’re building an AI automation, I’d lean on tools that naturally integrate. Claude, for example, has a relationship with Notion and Asana. If you’re not looking for AI integrations, I might recommend trying Trello. It’s part of the Atlassian suite and is used by many development teams, but what I like about Trello is that you build your boards with the statuses that best suit the way you think, and it’s very visual. If you’re looking for something more like a game, try Habitica. It’s an RPG-style productivity app whose motto is literally “Gamify Your Life.” It’s entertaining, visual and has a community of guilds for added support and accountability — but it can also be somewhat distracting, so I’d only use this if you’re a game enthusiast and a visual learner/doer.

I created a guide called 5 Intentional Tools for this exact purpose. When I think about intentionality in your tech stack, my first thought is: how is your data stored, encrypted, and used? Many free apps treat your data as their own asset. An asset that can be used in analytics and shared with third parties. So security, encryption, and data sovereignty were the filter. This list doesn’t mention Anthropic or Claude, because I wanted it to be AI-free. I also wanted to focus on tools that are less well-known, with heavy competition in their industry spaces. If you’re interested, that list is free on the Cielo Studio website: begin.cielostud.io » tap Builder + Creator.

// the greatest technology you own is the one you were born with

---

*P.S. — for my paid community:*

Thank you for being here. I present to you The Cloud Oracle Deck.

I worked with Claude to port the oracle deck, referenced above, to my site. It’s posted at thepeoplescto.io/oracle if you’d like to draw a card yourself. Feel free to share with someone else who could use a gentle reminder that consciousness is beautiful but creating and building can be hard. Balance is the mechanism to remain grounded, rest is a requirement and gratitude and love are outputs. May you be blessed in all things with ease, grace and in harmonious ways.

With ∞ gratitude,

~C~

There’s a builder I’ve been watching for a while now. He goes by Ryan AI, and what he does, on the surface, is simple: he offers free technical help to small businesses. He researches them first. He shows up consistently. He makes real recommendations to real people who could never afford a consultant.

log 07.12.26

What if, he couldn’t afford a marketing department, so he became the value instead of advertising it? The free help is the funnel. The research is the credibility. The consistency is the brand. He collapsed marketing, lead generation, and portfolio-building into one activity that also happens to be genuinely generous and regenerative. A funded company would hire three departments to do what he does in a single gesture. And he does all of this while making it look effortless.

The think pieces would call that hustle and celebrate it as such. But I recognize patterns, and it’s not hustle. It’s integration — the kind most funded companies couldn’t replicate if they tried, because they’ve never had to make one action do four jobs.

This is what I keep coming back to about the workaround economy — also known as the creator economy. The people building in it are not scrappy. They are some of the best systems designers alive. Constraint didn’t make them resourceful. It revealed how much design talent was already there, waiting for a problem worthy of it.

So here’s the question that follows, and it’s the one this whole series has been circling: if the ingenuity is this obvious, why doesn’t anyone fund the bridge?

For a long time, I assumed the answer was rejection. Someone looked, evaluated, and declined. I no longer think that’s what happens. I think nobody looked at all, and that is the core issue.

The people in a position to fund don’t pass through this economy. Not out of malice — out of orbit. Maybe they were born into wealth, went to wealthy schools, moved in wealthy circles, and now they do things with their wealth alongside people who also have wealth, because that’s the room they’re in. The result is a closed loop. As I thought recently, while tired and lamenting the challenges of being a founder with zero traditional backing, and I’ll keep it plain: it’s hard to get capital, funding and support, and we put the brunt of the effort on the person actually trying to build something. It’s a double whammy. Investors already have a portfolio, and they’re streaming out more capital because they have access to it. It’s just recycling the same money in the same spaces. Every now and then someone new might get a little attention. But that doesn’t seem like the norm, and it doesn’t support the estimated $205–323 billion in revenue being driven by the “workarounders” of the creator economy — a market Research and Markets puts at ~$323B this year, up 26.5% year-over-year1, that Goldman Sachs projects will roughly double from its 2023 baseline to ~$480 billion by 20272, and that long-range forecasts have crossing $1 trillion by the early 2030s. More than 207 million people worldwide identify as creators3.

I don’t say any of this to assign guilt. Guilt is a dead end, and critique of someone’s wealth converts exactly no one. What’s missing isn’t shame. It’s exposure. I sometimes imagine it as a ride-along: come spend a day inside a lifestyle that isn’t yours. The local BBQ restaurant. The grocery store without the premium prices. The hours at the braiding shop. Not a panel, not a pitch event where the small builder performs for the funded room — an actual exchange. And it goes both ways. Maybe you introduce me to the $89 bottle of wine I’d never have considered, and it turns out it’s only forty dollars past the one I’d have bought. There could be something beautiful in sharing across those lines.

But there has to be an avenue. And I’ll be honest about a limit: I can see both sides of this divide, and seeing is not the same as carrying. I’m not sure I have the capacity to be everyone’s bridge.

But, here’s what I know instead.

If creators had more capital, they wouldn’t just be making a guide. They’d be starting a school.

The healer selling a PDF would be running a clinic. The teacher selling a Notion template would be running an academy. The vendor from the market I wrote about — real food, loyal customers, no infrastructure — would be running the neighborhood institution her cooking already deserves.

And me? If capital weren’t the constraint, Cielo Studio wouldn’t be a catalog of guides and sessions. It would be a network of local hubs, one in every major city, each building applications for the people around it, gathering real research on technology access, holding rooms where everyone — everyone — learns how technology works and how to make it better. Teams of developers building the apps while I lead the community work. The hubs feeding what they learn back to a center, so we could finally see the difference between technology access in China and technology access in Chicago and start closing the gap, instead of everything staying siloed while people in both places try to accomplish the same things and suffer the same costs.

That’s the visionary-sized version. What ships today is the version compressed to fit the capital available.

And the compression is everywhere once you see it. I’ve spent recent weeks trying to do something as basic as reset and upgrade my home network, and it has been a nightmare — not because networking must be this complex, but because the barriers stack: access, education, hardware, security, encryption. Layer on layer. And nobody with real support has been allowed to sit down and streamline it. Or they tried, and their work was stolen, or silenced, or starved.

So the vision compresses. The school becomes a guide. The clinic becomes a PDF. The academy becomes a template. Genius, everywhere, shipping at a fraction of its intended size and potential impact.

Every builder I’ve described is brilliant alone. The ingenuity is everywhere. The pooling is nowhere. Each one solving the same problems solo, marketing solo, absorbing the same platform tax solo — hustling toward twenty thousand followers because a mega-following is the only conversion path anyone left them.

And it’s not just exhausting the builders. It’s exhausting everyone. On the other side of the screen, nobody wants to follow a thousand creators to find the one thing that works for them. Nobody wants to be guilted into boosting someone to twenty thousand followers and be rewarded with more notifications, more content, more noise they can’t keep up with. Both sides of this economy are tired. The whole arrangement, to use a professional term from a former life, is whack.

But imagine it differently. Imagine the vendor with the loyal customers, the builder with the drop-ship setup, the one who can fix the Bluetooth speaker — pooling what they have instead of paralleling it. A bundle three people market together instead of three people hustling alone. Representatives who surface the creators underneath them, so the audience gets fewer, better doors instead of a thousand competing ones. Effort that adds up instead of running side by side.

That’s not a marketplace fantasy. That’s a village. The thing modern life quietly deleted and never replaced. The thing whose few remaining forms are gatekept so hard that access to them is, if you really think about it, shameful.

We don’t need to reach across the aisle. We need to reach next door.

What would it take to build that on purpose?

I’ll show you soon.

// the guide was never the vision. it was the vision compressed to fit the capital available.

Between Code & Conscience is written by Crystal A. Chubbs — founder, technologist, and The People’s CTO. I write about building technology that doesn’t extract from the people it serves.

More: thepeoplescto.io · Circuit + Soil

If this series is resonating, the best way to support it is to share it with one person building something small.

Share

🌐Two things on the horizon:

// new time: “we build” goes LIVE Fridays at 7PM on TikTok — ideation is done, we’re researching the focus app together. » we build

// next cohort: The Catalyst Game Beta is underway — the Gamma cohort opens in August. » join the waitlist

I’ve been watching something happen.

log 07.05.26

The workaround economy has gotten big enough to be noticed.

And now the same people who built the systems that made the workaround necessary are selling tools to the workaround builders. Premium tiers. Analytics dashboards. "Growth" subscriptions. Monetization unlocks. Things that feel like infrastructure but function like a tax on the people who already couldn't afford the original system. The creators in the workaround economy.

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The door was always just the beginning. But somebody put a toll on it.

I don't think this is a conspiracy. I think it's just what capital mentalities do when they see something working...something evolving. The guides and the newsletters and the creator communities started to move real money — not platform money, not VC money, human money, community funded and sourced money — and the platforms watching said: that's interesting. How do we get inside it? How do we extract?

So now there's a creator economy inside the creator economy. And a lot of the tools built for workaround builders are designed by people who have never had to build in the margins. They understand the market. They don't understand the constraint, the drive or the mission.

Here's what that looks like in practice.

The food vendor I mentioned last time — real food, loyal customers, no digital infrastructure — isn't just unaware of the tools. She's the target market for about forty different SaaS products she can't afford, doesn't need in that configuration, and would have to spend six hours learning to set up. The tools exist. The intentional support doesn't.

The extraction model adapted. It just put on a friendlier face.

And I've been sitting with the question that follows from that: what would a tool actually designed for the workaround economy look like? Not designed for the creator economy as a market segment. Designed by someone who is inside it. Who knows what it costs to build in the margins and isn't trying to add to that cost.

That question is live for me right now. More on that soon. // thoughts before dawn

In the meantime, here's what I know.

The workaround economy doesn't need more tools that extract. It needs tools that combine. The vendor with the loyal customers and no website, the vendor with the drop-ship inventory and no marketing, the person who knows how to troubleshoot the Bluetooth speaker — they are, together, something a platform could never manufacture. Separate, they're three small tables at a market. Together, they are infrastructure. Together, they are community. They are a village.

The ones building small aren't building alone because they want to. They're building alone because the tools that would let them combine never got built. Or they got built for someone else and then sold back to us at a markup.

That's the next constraint after the door opens.

Not the system that said no. The isolation that followed the yes.

// The extraction followed us here. The next move is intentional support by combining efforts.

I would love to hear more about your experiences in the creator economy. What is working and what is not?

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I am an observer and a technomancer. I notice patterns. I notice systems. And lately, I noticed something about the creator economy.

log 06.03.26

The creator economy is full of people selling $19 guides, $97 courses, and digital downloads about things they genuinely know. Creating communities for their specific area of expertise — some might even call it for their purpose. And for a long time I wondered — why so many? Why this format? Why now?

Then the “aha” hit me.

The person selling a guide about social media success probably wants to run an agency. The travel blogger probably wants to open a resort or plan aligned travel with groups of people to their favorite places. The wellness creator probably wants a practice with a staff and a building and a waiting list.

But they built the smallest thing they could afford. Because that’s what was available to them.

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Early in this build, someone whose job is to support me told me — in our first conversation, with almost no context, and without prompting — that I would have trouble getting funding. It came out of the blue during our first call.

If I’m honest, I have been sitting with the feeling of hearing “you’re probably going to have trouble getting funding” for a while.

And then I realized: that moment wasn’t about me. It was about what the system has taught that person to expect. The assumption was structural, not personal. The system had communicated its priorities so clearly, for so long, that even the people inside it trying to help had internalized the limits.

That’s how invisible rulebooks work. They don’t announce themselves. They just shape what feels possible before anyone asks.

Most people don’t have access to funding. Many don’t know how to get it even if they could. The traditional pathways — business loans, venture capital, angel investment, small business grants — were designed by people who already understood how they worked, for people who were assumed to share that knowledge.

So people adapt.

Some are working full time and building in the margins of their evenings. Some are managing chronic illness and can only give what their energy allows on the days they have any energy to give. Some tried to get funding and were told no. Some never knew the door existed in the first place.

This isn’t failure. This is vision operating under real constraints in a dense world with very few instruction manuals.

And the digital product — the guide, the course, the newsletter, the download — is what vision looks like when it refuses to wait for a system that isn’t coming. It’s the mechanism for the resource constrained.

I watched this up close at a community market in Atlanta recently.

One vendor had been selling delicious food and refreshing drinks for years — loyal customers, real relationships, genuine quality. No website. No way to reach people who weren’t physically standing in front of her table. No infrastructure for the next chapter of what she was building. No container for her obvious passion in feeding her community.

Another vendor had a product that could be drop-shipped — inventory held, packaged, and shipped by a third party. He was doing everything manually. Nobody had shared with him that the alternative exists.

A Bluetooth speaker sat silent because nobody in the room knew how to troubleshoot the connection issue.

And people stayed. Not to buy. To talk. To be in the same room with someone who was building something real and to feel, for a moment, like that was possible for them too.

Someone wanted to buy my personal framed affirmation at the Cielo Studio table. Not the printed guide — the one I had brought for myself. The one I look at daily to affirm my purpose. The one that wasn’t for sale.

What they wanted wasn’t a product. It was proof. Proof that someone else had found a way through. Something to hold while they were finding their own. And something inspirational in a heavy and weighted world.

That’s what the workaround economy runs on. Not just ingenuity. Not just adaptation.

Hope.

We know the system can be redesigned. Kiva proved it.

A microfinance platform that connects lenders directly with borrowers — small loans, real businesses, lives changed. When you redesign a lending system around access rather than risk avoidance, people build extraordinary things. The system wasn’t broken. It was just pointed in the wrong direction.

The tools exist. The will is the variable.

So, what do we do in the meantime?

We build the smallest thing we can. We show up in the workaround economy with our whole selves — not apologizing for the size of what we could afford to start, but understanding it for what it is.

A door.

And then we do something radical.

We shop small. We subscribe local. We hire from within the community. We keep the capital circulating among the people building it instead of sending it upward to platforms and algorithms that were never designed for us and were never going to send it back.

We become the system we needed.

I’m building at the intersection of technology, wellness, and culture. I started with a $19 guide, a free session, and a newsletter with a handful of subscribers. I am fully inside the workaround economy.

Every piece of what I’m building — the guides, the newsletter, the tech education initiative, the app — started as the smallest buildable version of something much larger. Not because that was the dream. Because that was the door that was open.

And I’m not embarrassed by that.

I’m inspired by it. I am proud.

Because every person I see building something small — with everything they have, under real constraints, without waiting for permission — is proof that the vision didn’t die when the system said no.

It just found another outlet.

The workaround was never the destination.

It was always just the beginning.

I mentioned technomancer earlier. I will share more on that soon.

And the person who wanted my framed affirmation. The thing I look at every day when I sit down to work on Circuit + Soil. I gave it to him — because this project is my mandala, and I believe in releasing things when it’s time. This offered me a chance to write a new affirmation — with an intention that starts, “I am the people’s CTO” — and I am here to build something great.

Will you join me?

// thoughts before dawn.

I’m building tools to help people reclaim their relationship with technology. And I’m doing it by spending 12 hours a day on screens, optimizing for algorithms, building nurture sequences and lead magnets and funnels, measuring engagement and conversion rates.

The contradiction is not subtle.

How do you balance being an intentional founder in the creator economy — asking for the same attention you are designing to give back to others?

How do you want to take time away from screens while building a website, an app, and managing social media platforms?

How do you optimize for the same systems you analyze and critique daily?

I don’t have clean answers. But I’m naming the contradiction out loud because naming it is the first step toward building something different.

First, the scale of what we’re inside.

The average American adult spends 7 hours and 3 minutes on screens every day — more time than most people sleep. Globally, adults averaged 6 hours and 51 minutes of device time daily as of April 2026. Gen Z spends over 9 hours daily on screens at the high end of usage. Icaap + 2

We are spending the majority of our waking lives inside systems that were not designed with our wellbeing as the primary variable.

And the brain is paying for it.

Heavy smartphone and social media use is associated with measurable cognitive effects — declines in attention, memory, and executive function that in some studies resemble accelerated aging. Oxford named “brain rot” its 2024 Word of the Year. This isn’t slang anymore — it’s a documented cognitive state. Authenticity Associates

People who spend over two hours daily scrolling experience a 35% decline in prefrontal cortex impulse control — the brain region responsible for rational decision-making.

Extended social media exposure alters dopamine regulation, reinforcing addictive tendencies similar to substance dependence. Late-night digital engagement contributes to melatonin suppression and chronic sleep debt, impairing cognitive function. Pepperagency

This is not a personal failing. It is a design outcome.

The mechanism is deliberate.

Modern platforms are built on variable reward systems — the same psychological architecture that underpins gambling. Notifications, likes, algorithmic feeds: each delivers intermittent reinforcement, training the brain to seek unpredictable rewards and explaining why social media feels addictive and hard to quit. Authenticity Associates

Dopamine levels spike in response to a phone notification, which encourages checking and longer use. The most extreme form is “phantom text syndrome” — perceiving a ringtone or alert when none exists. The brain creates a false excuse because it wants you to check your phone. Kalodata

The result is not casual use. It is compulsion dressed as connection.

While users often experience short-term gratification from social media activity — receiving likes or comments — a significant number report distress or negative emotional effects and symptoms resembling addictive behaviors. Rob Dial

You feel the pull. And then you feel worse. And then you check again.

What if we got the metrics completely wrong?

Every business metric we use was designed to optimize for extraction — of attention, of time, of money. The language itself tells you:

Churn. Conversion. Retention. Engagement. Time on app.

These are not human words. They are machine words applied to human behavior.

What if we replaced them?

The metric isn’t the number. The metric is the human behind the number. Human-centered stops being the Figma board and UX conversations that are long forgotten several releases at Alpha when the “real data” starts to flow in.

That’s not a soft idea. That’s a harder standard than anything currently being measured.

Even the metrics for coaching, wellness, and personal businesses support productivity and hustle culture — how many hours, how many clients, how many sessions booked. But what if we measured how many days we brightened? How many users stayed and became happier — not how many left and how to prevent it next time?

What if every existing metric became an empathetic, human-focused one?

The world is changing underneath us.

People are waking up from their programming. Reading again. Dropping the masks. Showing up authentically in ways that would have felt risky two years ago. Seeking IRL experiences with a hunger that surprises even them.

The metrics don’t show this yet. But you can feel it.

My focus is clarifying. Not abandoning the build — the website, the app, the content, the markets. But holding it differently.

The goal isn’t a full funnel. The goal is something closer to Kintsugi — filling the cracks with gold. Finding clarity, coherence, and sovereignty in what already exists. And using that as the foundation for a real life of culture, language, art, and meaning.

Building your space in the digital or physical world should not require so much energy that it siphons the life you’re trying to build.

We have not yet built a signal world — one optimized for people, by people. But that’s the direction.

And here’s the thing the research actually shows.

The damage is real. And it’s reversible.

Studies show significant cognitive recovery within just one week of digital detox. Reaction times improved, anxiety decreased significantly, and sleep quality improved measurably. Sustained improvements were documented at one-month follow-up. Your brain’s neuroplasticity allows healing when behavior changes. Authenticity Associates

More importantly — intentional technology use doesn’t just stop the damage. It actively builds cognitive reserve.

A meta-analysis of 57 studies examining data from more than 411,000 adults ages 50 and older found that technology users had lower odds of cognitive impairment and reduced rates of decline over time. “Far from causing digital dementia, technology engagement is consistently linked to better brain health.” NapoleonCat

Research from the American Psychological Association indicates that learning multiple new skills in a supportive environment can, over time, help older adults achieve similar scores on cognitive tests as young adults. Social Media Today

Foreign language learning engages an extensive brain network that overlaps with regions negatively affected by the aging process — making it one of the most effective tools for building cognitive reserve. Hawxtech

The same tool that accelerates cognitive decline when used passively and compulsively — protects and rebuilds the brain when used intentionally and actively.

That’s not a wellness opinion. That’s neuroscience.

The People’s CTO exists because technology should ease and amplify your life. Not replace it.

This can look like understanding that your body is also technology. Or learning to use AI without losing yourself to it. Or building an app backed by behavioral psychology, neuroscience, and metaphysics. Or traveling with intention and with an app that helps you stay safe. Or knowing which five notifications to turn off so the first hour of your day stays yours.

Health. Wellness. Technology. Culture. These aren’t separate things. They’re the same thing. A full life.

Building your space — digital or physical — should not require so much effort that it siphons the energy you need to live that life.

We have built a world that is not yet a signal world — optimized for people, by people. But that’s what we’re building.

And I’m not building alone. I’m building with whoever is ready.

That’s not irony. That’s just how change works. That’s my journey. The person who builds the alternative usually has to survive the thing they’re replacing long enough to finish the work.

// the people’s CTO cielostud.io

Not on a screen. Not through a window. Outside, IRL. The big beautiful, brilliant ball of light energy.

I have watched a lot of sunsets. This one felt like a long-overdue closing ceremony.

log 05.20.26

Breathe in deeply, 1, 2, 3, 4...hold 2, 3, 4...

Breathe out slowly 2, 3, 4...

release...

Follow the natural rhythm of your breath.

This morning I watched the sun rise.

Same sky. Different light. The darkness I have been writing about for weeks — the bardo, the composting, the breath the world holds before it exhales — lifted in the way that darkness lifts when it is ready. Not dramatically. Quietly. Like a whisper that says “hello world”.

I have been in that darkness longer than I expected. Longer than was comfortable. And I have been writing about it here because some things need to be witnessed to be real.

A few things are certain.

• Every bad thing — and I mean every bad thing, the ones from this chapter and the ones that feel like they arrived from other lifetimes — are behind you. Not forgotten. Not erased. Behind. The way a sunrise puts the night behind it without pretending the night didn’t happen.

• Something is in front of us now.

• It has been building quietly. With intention. In the dark where things grow before they are ready for light. And this morning it is ready for light.

There are people forming around this. The right people. In the right places. With the right energy and the right skills and the right belief in what is being built.

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There is revenue. Small and real and meaningful in the way that first proof always is — not because of the number but because of what the number confirms. Someone believed enough to pay. And then someone else did. And then someone else.

There is a follower who found this and decided to stay. And then fifty more. And then more after that.

There are collaborations taking shape that I couldn’t have dreamed. They required the emergence to become possible.

And there is a clarity — about what I am building, who I am building it for, and why — that I have never had before. Not in twenty years of enterprise work. Not in any role that came with a title and a salary and a defined scope.

This clarity always arrives when you least expect it — in a hotel room after a delayed flight, in restless musings before bed, in strategic discussions with what feels like an inner circle, and in quiet moments of reflection — maybe even in this moment as you’re reading this.

I have been building. We have been building, haven’t we?

I know I am closer to the truth of it than I have ever been. Somewhere between the technical and the sacred. Between the institutional and the personal. Between what I was trained to do and what I actually believe is worth doing.

Something else entirely.

And it is just beginning.

🌿Circuit + Soil

☁️ Cielo Studio

🖱️The Kind Click

Thank you for sitting in the dark with me.

The dawn is here. ☁️

// the precursor to every beautiful new day

log 5.18.26

Not silence exactly. A darkness that exists just before the light arrives. Not the darkness of midnight. Not the darkness of closed eyes. More like a stillness. Like the world holding its breath.

I have been in that breath for a while now. Longer than I expected. Longer than was comfortable.

I have written about dying. About the waves. About what integration looks like when you can barely scramble eggs. About the cortisol that masks the magic. About the signals buried too deep to transmit.

What I haven’t written yet is what comes next.

Some things deserve to arrive before they are named.

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I have been in the bardo.

I have been composting.

And I have been learning to trust the dark the way a seed trusts the soil — not because it can see what’s coming, but because something in it knows that pressure and darkness are not the enemy. They are the path.

A germination of an idea. Planted in what could feel like destruction, but things grow and transform in sometimes harsh and unexpected conditions.

Shaped by everything that released. Everything that was designed to keep me small.

I know it has been building. Quietly. With intention. In the dark where things grow before they are ready for light.

I know it is more honest than what came before.

I know it is more me.

What if we learned to trust the darkness before the dawn? Not to rush it. Not to illuminate it prematurely. Just to sit in it and know — something is coming.

A creator I follow on TikTok, named Shayde (), shared a quote this week: “The cost of miracle is mystery.” He is right. The unknown shapes the future, and your comfort level shapes the world around you.

I commit there is, in fact, light in the distant future.

If you have been reading this series — thank you for sitting in the dark with me.

The dawn is close.

// thoughts before dawn.