zz-plant/whether

Weekly operating guidance for startup leaders
The interest-rate and credit lines that pause or resume your hiring, spend and raise. Checked every Monday, with an email the day one is crossed. Whether is free.
This week's brief ·
Monday email ·
Try it in one command ·
MCP & agent API ·
Documentation
## How it works
Whether scores two things from public U.S. market data every Monday:
Funding pressure (0–100): how hard it is for U.S. companies to raise and borrow money. Higher is worse.
Risk appetite (0–100): how willing investors and buyers are to back new products, hires and growth. Higher is better.
Together the two scores place the week in one of four conditions: Sunny, Cloudy, Stormy or Freezing. Interest rates, the yield curve, the pace of rate rises, stock-market volatility and the Chicago Fed financial conditions index move the scores, because the record holds each of them at every month-end since 2012. Inflation, labor, the high-yield credit spread and startup-market inputs are shown beside them and move nothing.
Each decision area gets an action for this week, a pause line that holds it back and a resume line, set apart from the pause line so one noisy week cannot flip it. Three rows from the brief for the week of Oct 19, 2026, in Cloudy conditions:
| Area | This week | Pause line | Resume line |
| Hiring | Limit hiring to backfills and mission-critical roles tied to delivery risk | Funding pressure > 76 or risk appetite < 44 | Funding pressure < 66 and risk appetite > 54 |
| Spending | Put a payback figure on every discretionary line before approving it | Funding pressure > 76 | Funding pressure < 66 and the payback figures still hold |
| Fundraising | If you plan to raise, prepare the materials now so the timing stays yours | Risk appetite < 44 or funding pressure > 76 | Risk appetite > 54 and funding pressure < 66 |
The live brief at / fits the actions to a company's stage and cash runway. Every number traces to its formula and source on /trust.
## The product
| Decide (/operate): this week's rule for each area, the work to stop and start, and a runway planner. | Why it changed (/signals): each reading since the last brief, measured against the lines it governs. |
| Trust (/trust): how each score is built, where each feed comes from and when it last updated. | Record (/history): conditions by month since 2012, every published brief, and how past calls held up. |
| Share (/share): the week's guidance as a Slack post, email, meeting slide, ticket or investor update. | On a phone: the same brief at 430px. |
Captured from whether.work on Oct 21, 2026. docs/assets/README.md says how to recapture them.
## Quick start
### Try it without installing
Every endpoint is public and needs no key or account:
bash
curl https://whether.work/brief.md
That prints this week's brief as Markdown: the conditions, the guidance, and each decision with its pause and resume lines. For the same reading as about 3KB of JSON, with each score against its lines:
bash
curl "https://whether.work/api/agent?view=state"
### Run locally
bash
git clone https://github.com/zz-plant/whether.git