Hello, world. We are death.tech

Every engineer’s first program prints two words. It seems only fair that an engineering team’s first blog post does the same: hello, world.

We’re death.tech, the engineering and technology team at Octopus Legacy. We build software for one of the few things guaranteed to happen to every single person on the planet. Most tech companies would rather not say the word. We put it in our name.

That’s deliberate. Death touches every family, but the services around it have barely moved. Wills, probate and lasting powers of attorney still run largely on paper, phone calls and waiting. The same person who can rebook a flight from their phone in a minute can spend weeks chasing forms after someone dies. AI has barely reached this corner of the law. We think it deserves products as good as the ones people use to book a holiday or move money between accounts, and that’s what we’re building.

Why we’re starting a blog

We work on an unusual mix: one of the oldest problems there is, and some of the newest ways of building software. People have been writing wills for thousands of years, and some of the law we work with dates from 1837. We get to tackle it with tools that didn’t exist a couple of years ago, and with the freedom to decide for ourselves what software development looks like now that AI is part of every step.

That’s too interesting to keep to ourselves. Where we can, we’ll build in the open and write about what we love, what we learn and what we break along the way. This blog is where that starts.

Why it matters to us

Octopus Legacy exists because our founder, Sam, lost his mum suddenly and found everything that followed confusing, slow and lonely. Plenty of us have our own version of that story. It’s a big part of why we’re here.

It also changes what a bug means. If a shopping site is confusing, someone gets annoyed and buys their socks somewhere else. If a probate tool is confusing, a family that’s already grieving has a harder week. When we get it right, people spend less time on paperwork and more time with each other.

That’s serious, and we take it seriously. It doesn’t make this a gloomy place to work.

Who we are

We’re a small team of engineers, designers and product people. We ship a lot, we use AI in almost everything we do, and we spend the time that saves on the problems that need a person.

On our careers page, everyone has picked the song they’d like played at their funeral. It turns out to be a very good way to get to know someone. The choices run from very moving to very silly.

What we’ll write about

Mostly the things we already argue about at work:

• Old law, new code. Turning rules written for quill and paper into software, and knowing when software should step back and let a person decide.
• Engineering in the AI era. How we actually use AI day to day: what’s worked, what hasn’t, and what it’s done to the way we build.
• Building for hard moments. What we’ve learned designing for people who are planning for a death, or in the middle of dealing with one.
• The people. Who’s on the team, what they’re working on, and what brought them here.

Expect deep dives, short notes and honest write-ups of the things we got wrong. If there’s something you’d like us to cover, tell us.

Like the sound of this?

If you’d like to build software for one of the hardest times in people’s lives, with a team that’s happy to talk about it, take a look at our open roles.

Hello, world. Nice to meet you.