about

A small team building a stubborn product.

Brainback is a consumer AI company with one belief: the moment of struggle is the entire mechanism of learning. The whole product design is downstream of that.

7 peopleremote-first

The founders met in the fall of 2024, both frustrated at the same thing: watching students in their orbit — a nephew, a research assistant, a partner in law school — use AI in ways that felt like intellectual erosion. Every assignment done. Every concept unlearned. Every exam a surprise.

We spent a month arguing about what to build. Halfway through we realized we were arguing about the wrong axis. The question wasn’t “how do we make an AI tutor more accurate” — it was “how do we make an AI tutor that refuses to be an answer machine.” Once we saw the question, the product design fell out of it.

the four principles

What we hold to when the market disagrees.

Every request to weaken the product for a short-term gain gets checked against these four lines.

Refuse the shortcut

Every design decision is a small refusal of the answer machine. If it makes the assignment faster and the exam harder, it's not going in.

Ship the question

The tutor's job is to hand back one guiding question — not a completed proof, not a finished essay. Nothing else.

Enforce with code

Prompts drift. Rules encoded in the API do not. Attempt-gate, output-guard, hint-ladder — all server-side, not stances in a system prompt.

Respect struggle

Struggle is not a bug. It's the mechanism. Anything that removes it removes learning with it.

the company, quickly

Where we are today.

people on the team

institutional pilots

months since v1

answer buttons ever shipped

“0 answer buttons” is the number we’ll always be proudest of

We are pro-struggle. Pro-attempt. Pro-slow. Pro-the-messy-first-draft. Pro-the-wrong-first-guess. Pro-your-brain.

— from the manifesto

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