Software that remembers why it was built.

We are building an AI product for the people who build software. It holds a project from requirement to retirement as one connected model — so the reasoning behind the code outlives the people who wrote it.

ν For β For α For FORNAX THE FURNACE
Fornax — the furnace, charted by Lacaille in the southern sky. Three stars, two lines: the smallest graph that still tells you something.

The problem

Every project forgets.

A requirement is agreed in a meeting. A trade-off is settled in a thread. A constraint is discovered at three in the morning and explained in a commit message nobody opens again. Six months on, the code is still running and the reasoning is gone.

What is left is a system nobody can safely change — not because it is badly written, but because the question it answered was never kept next to the answer. Teams rediscover their own decisions at full cost, and the most expensive knowledge in the organisation leaves on a notice period.

What we are building

One connected model, requirement to retirement.

Fornax holds the whole life of a project as a single graph: the requirement, the decision that shaped it, the design that followed, the code that implements it, and the day it is finally switched off. Each one linked to the reasoning that produced it.

Requirement Decision Implementation Operation Retirement PROJECT LIFECYCLE — PLATE II

Connected, not filed

Documents sit in folders and forget each other. A graph does not. Every artefact points back at the reasoning that produced it.

Answers, not archaeology

Ask why a constraint exists and get the decision, the people in the room, and the date — not a search result to interpret.

Outlives its authors

People move on, vendors change, teams are rebuilt. The model stays, and the project stays understandable.

Company

Fornax Systems

We are a software company in Warsaw, building for engineering organisations that have to live with their decisions for years rather than quarters.

Fornax — the chemist’s furnace — is a faint constellation that the French astronomer Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille charted from the Cape in the 1750s. It has no bright stars and no mythology attached to it; he drew it as a furnace with the still set on top. We took the name deliberately. The work we care about is the unglamorous kind: keeping the record of how and why a thing was made, so it can be changed safely long afterwards.

Contact

Write to us.

If your codebase has outlived the people who wrote it, we would like to hear from you.

Opens in your mail application.