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SynthBoard

AI Advisor · Engineering Leaders

For the calls
where every option has a tech-debt receipt

Architecture, hiring, build-vs-buy, and rewrite-vs-refactor decisions argued by The Engineer, The Operator, The Security Chief, and The CFO — before you commit your team's next six months.

Start free See how it works

In short

Each expert researches alone before reacting, so answers draw on current sources, not only training data. For bleeding-edge choices, treat the board as a senior engineer who knows the patterns but not your repo — check framework-specific claims against current docs.

Last reviewed

An example

One ask, start to finish.
What comes back is a memo.

How a board takes a call like this: her read, who sits, what they ask first, then the call — with how sure they are, who disagreed and the first step.

Engineering Leaders

Example · Board of 3

Migrate from monolith to microservices now (greenfield team) or wait until we hit scaling pain?

Chief of staff

This one needs a board: The Engineer, The Operator and The CFO. The Engineer translates ambition into what’s actually buildable, by when, with whom. Each researches alone first, then they react to one another — and on a decision, two of them take opposed sides.

  • The EngineerTechnical Builder
  • The OperatorCOO
  • The CFOFinancial Controller

Asked first

Who builds this — your team, a contractor, or someone you’d hire?

Our teamA contractorA new hire

The board’s call

Stay on the monolith and adopt strict service boundaries within it (modular monolith).

Microservices early adds 40-60% engineering overhead without proportional gain. Modular monolith preserves the optionality of splitting later.

Confidence74 · Moderate

The CFO disagreed

“If you scale headcount past ~25 engineers without service boundaries, the migration cost compounds”

First step Test what The CFO flagged before you commit.this week

Board of 3 · up to 135 credits on the card · an example, not a recorded run

Other asks people bring here

Several asks in one message become several rooms, each with its expert and its own price on the card. Keep or drop any, then convene them together.

  • Hire a staff engineer or promote my best senior to staff and backfill? — The Operator, up to 85 credits
  • Should we adopt this new framework on the next big project, or stick with what the team knows? — The CFO, up to 85 credits
  • Build the auth system in-house for control, or use Auth0 / Clerk for speed? — The Security Chief, up to 85 credits

What you get

What she handles.
On this kind of call.

Architecture decisions with cost framing

The Engineer argues feasibility; The CFO argues opportunity cost; The Operator argues delivery risk. The trade-off becomes legible.

Org-design and hiring

Team topology, IC-vs-management splits, hiring vs. promoting, contractor vs. FTE — argued with The Operator and The Empath in the room.

Security and reliability built in

The Security Chief and The Engineer surface the failure modes most architecture diagrams gloss over.

Decision records, not Slack threads

Every board ends in an ADR-quality memo: the call, the conditions it holds under, who disagreed and why, and a first step with a date. Your decision log writes itself.

Why SynthBoard

Why SynthBoard for this.
Not one voice. A board.

Technical depth with business framing

Architecture posts on Hacker News skip cost. CFO advice skips technical reality. A board puts both arguments in the same room.

Past decisions, on file

Tell her your stack and past ADRs once; they stay on file with their sources. A decision you made six months ago comes back when a new ask would reverse it.

Anti-HiPPO for engineering

The loudest principal engineer in your org usually wins architectural arguments. The Boardroom doesn't weight by tenure or title.

Decision velocity, not committee-by-Slack

Architecture committees take weeks to land a decision. A board lands a memo in about 6–10 minutes — useful as the input to the committee, or as a replacement for it.

Who sits

The experts for this call.
Each one holds a position.

Your Chief of Staff proposes who sits for the call, and every board is built with someone whose job is to argue against the obvious answer. Name an expert and they take a seat; tell her who you want on your board and they sit by default. How many seats a board has depends on your plan.

Pick an expert

Hover, tap or tab throughSwipe, then tap one
  • GPT
  • Claude
  • Gemini
  • Grok

Seats are spread across model families: GPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok and more.

In their words

Most architectural mistakes aren't technical. They're social — the team agreed in a hallway, no one wrote down why, and six months later we can't unwind it. A boardroom forces the why into a document.
The Engineer Technical Builder

Questions

Fair questions.
Straight answers.

What people ask before they bring this call to a board.

How current is the Boardroom on specific frameworks (Next.js 16, Bun, Rust async, etc.)?

Each expert researches alone before reacting, so answers draw on current sources, not only training data. For bleeding-edge choices, treat the board as a senior engineer who knows the patterns but not your repo — check framework-specific claims against current docs.

Can this replace an architecture review?

For early-stage architectural decisions, often yes. For high-stakes production changes, run a board first to surface trade-offs, then take the memo to a human architect for sign-off. The combination is faster than either alone.

How does this handle team-specific context (our codebase, our tech debt, our roadmap)?

Tell her your stack, team size, pain points, and quarter priorities once; they stay on file and ride into every room. She reads your tools — Notion, Google Docs, Slack, Linear, Gmail, Shopify, 62 integrations in all — and says what she read. On Pro and above, a write is a preview you confirm. For line-by-line code review, keep your existing tooling — a board is for decisions.

Will this just recommend "boring tech"?

Often, but not always. The Engineer is biased toward production-proven choices; The Strategist sometimes argues for new tech that becomes a hiring magnet or competitive edge. The memo surfaces the trade-off — boring stack is the default, and the board names when stepping out is worth it.

Can my managers and tech leads each use it?

Yes, each on their own account. There is no shared team workspace — each person keeps their own file. What travels between you is the memo. A board’s memo shares as a page anyone can read without an account.

Does the Security Chief actually understand modern threats?

The Security Chief is grounded in OWASP, CWE patterns, and common SaaS threat models. It will surface the threat-model question and recommend specific mitigations. For compliance-critical decisions (SOC 2 controls, HIPAA), ask for The Regulator too, for the audit-evidence side.

Keep exploring

Nearby decisions, audiences and methods inside SynthBoard.

SynthBoard (synthboard.ai) is one place for your business, your life, and every hard call. Your Chief of Staff keeps what you tell her on file, and 24 named experts on different AI models take the calls — one expert for a consult, a board with opposed seats for the hard ones — and hand back a memo with the call, the dissent and the first move. How it works.

The advisor you don't have, on demand.
Start free, with one message.

Hire a staff engineer or promote my best senior to staff and backfill?Build the auth system in-house for control, or use Auth0 / Clerk for speed?My principal engineer is blocking architectural progress. Coach, restructure, or let them go?

It waits in her box after you sign up. Nothing is sent until you press send. Free to start — 150 credits every month + 250 to start. Every consult and board shows its price on the card, and nothing runs until you tap.