Formation Bio Innovation & Technology Culture

What tools support your day-to-day work?

As part of Formation Bio's Enterprise AI team, we're constantly experimenting with the latest tools. I think of it less as finding a single model to rule them all and more as a tool belt where different tools serve different purposes. I use Gemini heavily for creative writing, and OCR and Claude are my daily drivers for most tasks.

Beyond individual tools, we're building something bigger internally: ARK (AI Repository of Knowledge), which wires Formation Bio's institutional knowledge into secure and permissioned internal AI agents, MCPs, skills and plugins.

One underrated area I'm a huge fan of: voice. I use voice mode constantly, including to answer this question and tools like Handy Computer let me dictate and have natural conversations with AI models in virtually any text box. It's fundamentally changed how I interact with these systems.

How does your team experiment?

Experimentation comes down to two things: how quickly you can move and how quickly you can undo. It's constant tinkering, where small changes compound over time into something meaningful.

One concept we lean on is "2-2-2." It's a shared vocabulary that gets people asking: What would the two-hour, two-day, or two-week version of this look like? That constraint forces you back to first principles. If you're thinking in months, it's probably too big to show value at the speed we want to move. We've shipped UI code within minutes of a user request because of this agility.

What makes the two-hour version possible is a shift from a building mindset to a composing mindset. The question stops being "what's the core primitive here?" and becomes "how do we combine what we already have?" Composing lets you remix and move faster and because your primitives are solid, you can safely tear down anything you don't like and replace it.

How does your company adapt to change?

Honestly, every company has had to adopt AI. That's not a particularly novel answer. Where Formation Bio stands out is in how we've leaned in rather than tiptoeing around change.

A great example: Earlier this year we equipped every employee with Claude Code and set aside a full build week to experiment and create things that would actually be useful for their jobs. We put extensive guardrails in place to ensure data and system security and the idea was simple: go build something you’d use every day. I used to teach programming and what would have historically taken a student 12 weeks to build, a colleague was deploying within one afternoon.

That shift informs how we think about our role as a platform team too. We're asking, "how do we mitigate risk and empower people to build?" We actually rebranded our developer experience team to builder experience, because our users aren't just engineers anymore. They are colleagues across a wide range of teams using AI and software to build their own tools. And our job is to make sure they're as productive as possible.