/seed-company — The Founding Mission, In the Person's Own Words

Why This Exists

Agents frequently have to write words another human will read — a customer reply, a re-engagement email, landing copy, a README, a launch post. An agent usually knows what the product does but not why it exists — the stakes, the personal story, what the organization refuses to do and why that refusal is the point. Without that, outward-facing writing reads like generic marketing copy instead of something a real founder or maintainer would actually say.

This skill is the outward-facing sibling of /seed: /seed holds what's being built right now, for agents to align internal work to; this one holds why the whole thing exists, for the people it's built for.

This must be the person's own words, never anyone else's. An agent that writes a company's founding mission for them is composing, not selecting — that's exactly the imitation /how-to-talk-like-the-founder (if you have it) exists to prevent, extended to a person's business rather than just their voice.

Where the seed lives

• Default: docs/intent/seeds/company.md in the current project.
• If the switches file (alignment-harness config path) has a configured company-seed path (useful if you run several projects under one company), use that instead.
• If neither exists: there is no company seed yet. Say so, and offer to draft one (see below) — never invent a mission paragraph to fill the gap, and never borrow anyone else's founding story as a stand-in, including the author's.

How to Use

When you need the founding mission for a customer communication, email, landing page, README, or any other human-facing context:

1. Check for the seed at the path above.
2. If it exists, read it and quote from it directly — don't paraphrase into something looser.
3. If it doesn't exist, offer to draft one (below) before writing outward-facing copy that would otherwise need to invent a mission.

If no company seed exists yet

Say so plainly: "When I write something your customers or users will read, I want it to carry why this exists in your words, not mine. I don't have that yet — I can draft one from what you've already written, and you correct it."

Then, with their yes:

1. Read what's already on record: the project's own README, an About or landing page, existing marketing copy — and (if institutional memory search is set up, or by grepping ~/.claude/projects/*/*.jsonl otherwise) the person's own past messages where they explained why the project exists or corrected an agent's description of it.
2. Draft the seed by quoting those passages, not rewriting them into new prose. Mark clearly which parts are direct quotes and which are your synthesis connecting them.
3. Where nothing exists to draw from, ask for a short dictation — three sentences is enough to start.
4. Present the draft and get their confirmation before saving it to the seed path above.

Meanwhile, if you have to write outward-facing words before a seed exists, write them without inventing a mission paragraph, and mark the spot as waiting on the person's own words rather than filling it with something plausible-sounding.

Suggested shape for a company seed

A useful company seed answers, in the person's own words:

• Why this exists — the gap it closes, the stakes, any personal story behind starting it
• Who it's for — the real person on the other end, not a demographic
• What it will and won't do — refusals that are part of the point, not just features
• The core thesis — the one or two sentences that, if someone only read those, would tell them what this is really about

When to Invoke

• Drafting a response to a customer or user who's never heard the "why"
• Writing re-engagement emails
• Creating landing page copy
• Writing a README's introduction or a launch post
• Any customer-facing communication where connecting someone to the mission would matter

Related

• /seed — the internal, current-work seed (what's being built now, for agents to align to)
• /align — surfaces the company seed as the confirmed top layer of the intent map when relevant
• /how-to-talk-like-the-founder (if you have it) — the voice this mission should be written in, once you've calibrated it to the actual person
• /writing-aligned-user-facing-words — shapes how this content reaches the reader