It does the paperwork. You do the signing.
Two friends want to start a company together. Tell Charter about the business in ordinary words and it gets the paperwork ready: checks the name is free, gets the web address, writes the contract between the owners, checks their ID, and puts it all in one file. Every time a real decision comes up, it stops and asks a person.
The pattern in each square is made from that step's own fingerprint. Change anything about a step and its square turns into a different shape.
Everything it did, in order. Each step is locked to the one before it.
It waits for an answer. There is no time limit and no way to skip past.
Once it even said no to a person, because the job they asked about was not the job it was doing.
Counted by running them. If a single one fails, this page does not get built.
Eight steps. In step seven it can do nothing at all.
Charter is only handed the tools that belong to the step it is on. If it asks for anything else it gets a no, and the no is written down. Step seven hands it nothing, because the only thing that happens there is a person making up their mind.
The forms are the easy part.
You can register a company yourself, online, for very little. What nobody helps with is the contract between the owners: who owns what, who gets to decide what, and what happens if one of them wants out. That is the piece people wish they had written down, three years later.
Here the two owners hold half each, and they said there is no agreed way for one of them to leave. Charter did not make one up. It wrote down that there is no way out, said why, and added the section that settles things when the two of them cannot agree.
It cannot sign for you, even if you ask.
Charter stamps documents it made itself, and it vouches for its own diary of what it did. It never signs for a person. This is not a setting anybody can switch off. The part of the code that hands a document to a person is walled off from everything Charter can reach, and a test checks that wall on every single build.
The wall went up before there was anything behind it. The first time a file was put in that folder the build broke, exactly as intended, and stayed broken until somebody wrote down in the open which one file is allowed through.
Watch it work, and watch it stop.
Two sisters opening a bakery in Texas, on . All steps are already on this page before you press anything, and you can drag the bar on the left to go back. of them are things the software could not do on its own. It is waiting at the first of those now.
Every line below is one thing that happened, in the order it happened. Reading across: the number of the step, who did it, what they did, and the detail.
The short codes at each end are fingerprints. A fingerprint is a short code worked out from the contents of a step, so any change to that step produces a different code. Each step also carries the fingerprint of the step before it, which is what links them into an order nobody can quietly rearrange. The code on the left of a line is the end of the line above it. That is the join.
What happened in each step
sections, dated . Two of them are only in there because of what a person answered back at step .
- Pages
- Anyone may fill in and sign
- Fingerprint
The file is locked. Filling in the blanks and signing is allowed. Changing the words is not, and every attempt gets turned down and written into the diary.
Empty on purpose.
Charter is not asked to do anything at this step. Plain code, which Charter cannot reach or influence, carries the file to a person.
sections. Two are only there because of what you said.
This is the real contract, not a sample. At step a person was asked whether the owners have an agreed way for one of them to leave and be bought out. The answer was no. Charter did not make one up. It wrote down that there is no way out, and why.
holds half. holds half.
How decisions are made
Where these came from
Charter did not make these up as it went. There is one fixed list of sections, in one fixed order, written down in the code before any run starts. Most of them are in every contract Charter writes. A few are not, and those are the ones that record something the owners actually decided.
A note on the word. The document itself calls them articles and numbers them that way, which is how contracts are normally written, so each one below is labelled the way it is labelled in the file. This page says sections, because that is the plainer word. They are the same thing.
Two of the sections are a matched pair, and exactly one of them is always used. If the owners have an agreed way for somebody to leave and be bought out, the contract gets the section that describes it. If they have not, it gets the section that says so plainly instead. There is no third option where the question goes unanswered. One more section, the one about deadlock, is added only when the shares make an exact tie possible, because a deadlock rule in a company that cannot deadlock is just noise.
Sections refer to each other by number. If a section that is left out is named by one that is kept, the whole thing stops rather than printing a contract that points at something not in it. That failure is the point: a document that reads perfectly and refers to a clause nobody agreed to is worse than no document.
The sections
Neither owner can outvote the other, and Texas law says neither of them can simply walk away. Charter did not choose that. It wrote down what the two of them said, and put the consequence in the contract instead of letting them find it in year three.
Nothing here has been signed, and the software that wrote it cannot sign it. This is not legal advice, and nothing on this page is a view on whether this contract is right for these two people.
One file, finished, ending on a blank line.
This is the real document. The words below were read straight out of the finished file, so what you see here is what is in it. You can download the file itself below and check it yourself.
What is in it
The two ID documents
Only the names of the boxes are shown here. Nothing actually read off either ID is on this page, in the data behind it, or anywhere a website could reach. A check refuses to build this page if anything shaped like an ID number turns up in it.
Where the owners sign
These lines are blank because the software cannot put anything on them.
The picture it did not draw.
The last step draws the new business its first shop picture. Charter gets no say in what that picture shows: the words below are the ones a person typed in the first minute, taken straight from the diary. In this example the drawing service was a stand-in, so no picture was made. Rather than show you one that never existed, here is the empty frame and the exact words that would have been sent.
Do not believe any of this. Break it.
Everything below runs inside your own browser. Nothing is sent anywhere. These are the questions the checker asks, in its own words, and you can run the same check on your own computer.
questions. came back yes. it cannot answer, and it says so instead of quietly leaving it out.
What this check still cannot tell you
The past can still be rewritten. It can no longer be rewritten quietly.
Below is a real step from the run: one of the two places it wrote down how much of the
company each owner holds. Change the 50 to 60 and see what
happens. Every step is locked to the one before it, so changing one breaks the rest.
This is the same check, on the same fingerprints, running in your browser. The real one reads the file on your own computer and sends nothing anywhere.
Most software ships a list of what it can do. This is the other one.
Every time Charter said no is written down, and all of them are printed inside the finished file under this same heading. Step is worth reading twice: that is Charter saying no to a person, because the job they asked about was not the job it was doing. The limit works in both directions.
outside companies. In this example, every one of them was a stand-in.
The example you can replay never touched the internet. Each outside company was a stand-in giving back answers recorded in advance, so nothing was bought, registered or charged. Two of them still produced steps worth reading: the search that changed the business name, and the registrar that said no twice before it said yes.
The one thing it will never do.
United States law does let software make a deal on your behalf, and you are bound by it. What the law does not do is call that a signature. A signature is something a person does, on purpose, meaning to sign. Software has no intent to lend you. So Charter can get everything ready, and the last act stays yours.
It does the paperwork. You do the signing.
Every company Charter talks to, what it sends them, and whether that has actually happened.
This page is generated from the code that runs. Nothing on it was written by hand, and a check fails the build the moment the page and the code disagree. So the awkward parts cannot quietly fall off it.
Live means it really happens in a run, and there is a command below that does it in front of you.
Written, not proven means the code exists, it is tested, and it has never met their server. That is not the same thing as working, and this project learned the difference the hard way: one of these clients sat here for weeks looking finished and was wrong in three separate ways at once. Wrong address, wrong request, wrong answer read back. Every one of them was invisible to a test suite that passed, because the tests handed the code an answer of the shape it already expected. The first real call found all three in ten minutes.
Not built means there is no code for it at all. It is on the list anyway, because a list you can only trust when something is missing from it is not a list.
Why the refusals are on this page.
Every company above sells more than Charter touches, and one of them sells face analysis. Saying which parts are refused is more useful than saying which parts are used, because the second is a feature list and the first is a boundary. So each one says what it will not do, and why.
Everything else on this page is a recording. This part is not.
Describe your own business in a sentence or two. Charter will work on it for real: a model deciding what to do next, a live search of the web for the name, the registrar's own practice account. It stops and asks you at every point only a person can decide, and it does not guess while it waits. At the end you get the packet, the record of everything that happened, and the attestation over that record, all three to download and check yourself.
This page is open as a file, so there is nothing to run.
The rest of the page works this way on purpose: it is one file and it needs nothing. Running your own idea is different, because it has to reach a model and a search company, and that needs a program running on a computer somewhere.
Two commands, on your own machine:
npm install npm run serve
Then open the address it prints. It works with no keys at all, using answers recorded in advance for every outside company. Add a free model key and set REPLAY_MODE=false and the same run goes out to the real ones.