About
FishTea is built by Shawn J. Stewart. It is the second life of a project he first wrote in 2006 — and the first version able to finish the idea, because the piece that was missing then is a small language model that now runs on an ordinary machine.
Shawn J. Stewart
Technical executive and venture builder with 25+ years scaling global engineering organizations, working in AI infrastructure, distributed systems and engineering leadership.
Why this exists
We assemble software from modules built for everyone, and pay for every variation in conditional logic. That habit is inherited from storing data in rows and columns and then building software in the shape of the storage — which is why permissions and personalisation always arrive late, as layers on something that never expected them.
FishTea starts from a different premise: a business is an authority that answers questions, and the interface is the last and thinnest layer rather than the first and thickest.
The first FishTea, in 2006, had that idea and could only build half of it. Working out what a visitor meant, cheaply enough to sit in front of every request, was not possible then at any price. A small tool-calling model on ordinary hardware removed that constraint, and the rest follows from it.
The full argument is in Welcome; the design, including the decisions that are settled and why, is in the blueprint.
Contributing
The most useful contribution is a plugin. Everything outside the conversation itself is one:
integrations, design systems, auth, notification channels, whole archetypes. Write it locally with
fishtea plugin create, and when it is good, fishtea plugin promote moves it into
the framework — a move, not a rewrite, so the application you wrote it for keeps working untouched.
See Plugins for the mechanism.