For people whose work is not theirs to change.

I'm self-taught, so I know what it is to spend a long stretch inside something you did not choose and cannot argue with. That is not the same as the work this page is about. It is where my interest in it comes from.

I build for one group of people at a time. Right now that group is anyone whose day is made of rules somebody else wrote — a registrar, a compliance officer, an accounts clerk, an admissions desk, a teacher taking attendance, a radiographer. Not only government. Any context where the procedure arrived before you did.

I am a designer, and designers are specifically unable to be single-minded. It is not a discipline I acquired; it is a thing I cannot switch off. Your work is built on the opposite assumption — that you will hold one thing at a time, in order, without wandering — and that assumption is what makes it dull. It was never a true description of you either.

So what I am offering is not a way to concentrate better, and it is not a way out. It is fun, supplied through the tools rather than by me, and it is temporary. The work is still there when it stops and you still cannot change it. That part was never mine to touch. It is also not a licence to do the work badly: the register still balances, the file still closes, the form is still correct.

They run on AI, and I build them on one rule about it. The AI reads language — what you wrote, and how you wrote it. It decides nothing. Every judgement is made by code, and the code is there for you to open and read. I keep the two apart because they are different kinds of thinking, and most of what goes wrong with these systems is one of them being asked to do the other's work.

That rule has a name and a site of its own. Split-Domain Cognition is the principle; Koher is one thing built on it, not the thing itself. I named it inside this practice, and it turned out to be larger than the practice. The case for it sits at splitdomaincognition.org, worked out well beyond software — in curation, in urban planning, in how a diagnosis gets written. I put it there so that anyone can build something else from it.

The enjoyment is the point rather than a sweetener. Joy is a counter-product — it yields nothing, it cannot be booked, and no procedure knows what to do with it. That is precisely why it stays yours.

They don't teach. They don't judge. They don't report on you to anybody. What happens inside them is yours, and when you close the tab nothing is kept.

Why free

Something that costs money has to be justified, budgeted for, and accounted to somebody — which is the exact texture of the work these tools are meant to interrupt for a few minutes. A charge would make them one more item in the procedure.

They cost almost nothing to run, so there is nothing to recover. 10 free analyses a day on any tool. No account. No email. No expiring trial. The tools are free, and they always will be.

A cyborg project

Koher is neither human nor AI — it's both. I said what and why. Claude Code offered how. The division of labour — human handles judgement, AI handles synthesis — isn't just what the tools do. It's how they were made.

I couldn't have built this without AI. Claude Code couldn't have built it without me. It doesn't know what matters, when something is good enough, or why one framing serves the work better than another.

The architecture is autobiography. The split that runs through the practice is the same split the tools are built on.

why Koher is built this way →