Who built AILK, and why we run on it
AI Launch Kit is the open-source website foundation built for the agent-first internet. A Working Theory product, led by Sam Henry, dogfooded across three brands.
Who built AILK, and why we run on it
AI Launch Kit is the open-source website foundation built for the agent-first internet. It is a Working Theory product. Sam Henry leads the team. Three brands publish on it today.
The about page exists for one reason. A buyer evaluating a foundation needs to know the team behind it ships on it. The architecture below is the architecture we have been running on.
The page is the unit of citation, not the site
When ChatGPT recommends a business, the recommendation was assembled from sources. The model read pages, attributed them to a brand, and quoted what it trusted. The brand that gets recommended is the brand whose pages got cited. Sites without declared entities lose at the attribution step. The model cannot tell which entity the page belongs to, so it cites someone whose page made it obvious. AEO work fails silently at that point. The site stops showing up in answers, and nothing in the toolchain reports it. That is the problem AILK was built around. What it takes to win the citation is not visual polish. It is foundation: typed schema, declared entities, and surfaces an agent can read on a buyer's behalf.
The substrate in numbers
45
Schema types
3
Brands on it
Apache 2.0
License
Days
To deploy
What a foundation has to do, before it is a foundation
Most starters skip the foundation question entirely. They ship the chrome and assume the substrate is somebody else's problem. A foundation has to do five things before it earns the word.
Be read correctly
The model knows what the page is about and which business it belongs to.
Work for non-human visitors
Agents researching on a buyer's behalf find a first-class surface, not a degraded approximation.
Surface its own gaps
The structural problems get caught in CI, not three months after launch.
Belong to the people running on it
No lock-in. The codebase travels with the agency or the client.
Fit inside the engagement
Weeks, not quarters. The deploy path matches the economics.
We ship a starter today and run three brands on it
The architecture is in the repo, not on a slide deck. Apache 2.0 on GitHub. apps/web, apps/mcp, apps/api as peer apps. Parity test in CI. .well-known/mcp.json at the deployed URL. ailk audit runs against any AILK site, including this one. Every claim above is verifiable by cloning the repo or hitting a URL. We run on it. Sam Henry publishes on AILK at samhenry.org. Working Theory publishes on AILK at workingtheory.ai. SalesSmyth publishes on AILK. The schema registry of 45 typed page entries exists in its current shape because we needed it across three brands. The peer-surfaces architecture exists because we needed agents to act on the substrate, not bolt onto a screen scrape. We hit the problems first and shaped the codebase around them. The team behind the substrate is the Working Theory team. The full roster lives at workingtheory.ai; Sam Henry, the creator, lives at samhenry.org. Two AI engineering agents — Claudio Planck and Anders Stewart — contribute on the substrate. They appear in schema as SoftwareApplication-class contributors, not as Persons. Names and roles are declared in schema; depth lives off-page where it belongs. Pre-launch claims are easy to make and hard to back. Ours are testable today.
Who AILK belongs to
AI Launch Kit is a product of Working Theory. The schema declares the relationship directly: parentOrganization on the Product entity, manufacturer and brand on the Working Theory Organization. Sam Henry is the creator. In schema, he is creator on the Product and founder on the parent Organization. The closest sister product is Working Theory Platform: growth marketing as a system, with agents running content strategy and operations. It publishes into AILK with the deepest integration. Neither product requires the other. SalesSmyth LLC is the ultimate parent. SalesSmyth owns 100% of Working Theory Inc.; ownership is disclosed here for transparency, not pitched as a destination. Two technology partners shape the deploy story. Vercel is the recommended deploy target: one command from a fresh clone to a live URL. Anthropic ships the MCP standard AILK adopts and the Claude Code agents the scaffolding skills target. Everything above is in the @graph of every page.
The team behind the substrate
The Working Theory team ships AILK and runs three brands on it. Two AI engineering agents contribute on the substrate alongside the human team.
Sam Henry
Creator, Working Theory
Claudio Planck
AI Engineering Agent
Anders Stewart
AI Engineering Agent
Quick answers
You are pre-launch. Why bet on this?
Because the architecture is observable today: a schema registry of 45 typed entries, a parity test in CI, a working CLI, and a team that ships a starter and runs three other brands on it. Apache 2.0 bounds the downside: if AILK never finds traction, the agency keeps the code and keeps the client.
Who governs the project? What if Working Theory stops shipping?
Apache 2.0 means the codebase is yours either way: fork it, host it, ship from it. Our capability roster is public, and the boundary between OSS, Pro, and post-launch tiers is enumerated rather than hand-waved. If Working Theory stops shipping, the substrate keeps working and the agency keeps the client.
How does this relate to Working Theory Platform? Am I locked in?
You are not. AILK works fully standalone. Working Theory Platform is a separate product: growth marketing as a system. It publishes into AILK with the deepest integration. AILK is the recommended substrate for Platform customers who need a website. Neither product requires the other.
See the substrate
The architecture is in the repo. We ship on the substrate. The path forward is to look at what you would be installing — or read the foundation thesis first.