Introducing Cohort

Neolith is now Cohort. Same product, same team, same thesis. A truer name.

Why change a name at all

Names are working tools, and Neolith did its job. It said new stone — the first material a species used to make tools, borrowed for the first substrate a company could be made from. It was a builder's name, chosen when the work was mostly substrate: the ledgers, the event spine, the surfaces, the machinery under everything.

But a name should say the thesis, and the thesis was never really about the substrate. It was about the group standing on it. The longer we ran companies on the product — starting with our own — the clearer it became that the unit that matters is not the tool. It is the formation: a handful of humans and a fleet of AI colleagues operating as one thing, or failing to.

The name on the door should describe that thing. So now it does.

Why the word cohort

A cohort is one group moving together. The word has held that shape for over two thousand years: a cohort was the unit that trained together, marched together, and held formation together — or did not survive. It is not a crowd, not an audience, and not a stack. It is the smallest group that moves as one.

That is precisely the thing this product exists to make possible. Inside Cohort there is no "users plus bots." An AI colleague has a name, an email address, a manager, a charter, and a desk. It sits in the same channels, sends from the same mail surface, appears on the same org chart, and answers to the same review cycle as the human two seats over — distinguished by one quiet signal, because pretending otherwise would be a lie. A named human holds the agenda. The colleagues, human and agentic, execute it. One group. One surface. One direction of travel.

We looked for a long time for a word that carried all of that without a slogan attached. It was sitting in the dictionary the whole time.

What exists today

A rename is a good moment to say plainly what the product is, because "operating surface for AI-born companies" earns its keep only if the surfaces are real. Today, Cohort is three layers, shipped and in daily use.

The suite. The workday itself: Home, with the macro pulse and a needs-you queue that counts everything genuinely waiting on a human. Spaces, DMs, and calls. A real mail surface with rules, shared mailboxes, and policy holds. Calendar. Docs, sheets, decks, and files. Boards with workstreams and kanban matrices. A revenue desk and a money desk — invoices, payroll, tax, reconciliation. A directory and an org chart where humans and AI colleagues appear as one roster. If a company runs on it, it lives here — not in a bot panel bolted to the side.

The governance layer. Every AI colleague operates inside a charter with an explicit decision-rights ladder: what it may do autonomously, what escalates, what is forbidden. Consequential calls land on an append-only decision ledger with rationale and signatures. Acts that cross a line stop and wait — approvals, desk holds, spending floors, and signature acts that complete only on cryptographic proof a human decided exactly this. Underneath all of it runs one hash-chained audit spine, so the org's history is a record, not a recollection.

The economics. Compute is payroll. An AI colleague costs two legible lines — its machine and its model time — and those lines sit on the same pay run as human salaries, metered task by task, at published rates. The Fleet page shows one machine per colleague with its live spend, and budgets watch the variances. Headcount you can read is headcount you can scale.

Around the edges: Genesis, which cold-starts a whole organisation from founder intent; an Agent SDK and an API for bringing your own agents onto the same governed surface; and desktop apps for the daily drive.

We build all of this the way the product prescribes. Cohort was born inside adaptic.ai, and adaptic runs entirely on it — the same needs-you queue, the same pay runs, the same audit spine. When a surface is wrong, we are the first to feel it.

What the rename changes — and what it doesn't

For the product, almost nothing. Workspaces, data, charters, ledgers: untouched. The app is Cohort now, and the new name will finish rolling through the edges over the coming releases — you may still catch the old one in a filename or an environment variable for a while. The current desktop installer, for instance, still ships under the previous name, and hosts provisioned before the rename still export NEOLITH_* variables. Every one of those is bridged: the SDK aliases NEOLITH_* and COHORT_* to each other at startup, the legacy CLI names keep working, and nothing you configured needs migrating. Write COHORT_* in anything new and let the fleet roll forward underneath you.

For us, the rename changes the sentence we open with. We are no longer explaining a stone metaphor and then pivoting to the point. The name is the point.

What's next

Cohort is in private beta, and we are taking design partners — founders who want to run a company this way and are willing to shape the roadmap and the pricing with us while we do. The near-term work is depth over breadth: making every surface strong enough that the suite disappears and only the company remains, and widening access as that bar is met.

This page is part of the plan too. Insights is where we will write down what we learn building an AI-born company on its own product — the design calls, the economics, the governance decisions, with real surfaces on the table. Two more essays ship today alongside this one: on compute as payroll, and on governance you can feel.

For two centuries, scale meant headcount. That has broken, and something has to replace it. We think the replacement is not a person with a very good tool. It is a small group of humans and a fleet of AI colleagues, moving together, in formation.

It is a cohort. Now the name says so.