Acknowledgments
"All the cards are on the table, but no one knows how to use them."

Our company is a wager. It is a wager that the requisite intelligence is already latent in the available models and a well built, clearly defined system is all that is needed to enable it. We feel it is important to share our understanding of the problems we are solving, and in doing so also acknowledge ideas and people in the space that have helped shape our opinions, whose footsteps we follow in. We understand that the space of coding tools is a crowded one, but it is increasingly misunderstood.

We are grateful for early believers in the codegen space including the Cognition team, Windsurf (now Cognition) and the Cursor team for making it possible for people to believe in this work.

We would also like to acknowledge the broader community of researchers in agent implementation and interface design, from teams like Altera, Metr, Anthropic etc. Their collective efforts have shown that agents, although difficult to productionize, will come to deeply impact human-computer communication. These teams continue to inspire us.

Finally, thank you to the developers who will take the tools we make and build something beautiful, useful, and unexpected.

We hope we can carry the torch forwards.

The Slate Development Team
August 2025
Random Labs
San Francisco, California