fieldnotes · published as we go

a living record.

capslock is an ai systems lab that builds from inside real companies. these are the notes we keep while doing it — what we make, what breaks, and what surprises us, published as we go. not announcements; just the work, with the door open.

method 2026-06 · 5 min read

you can't let an agent mark its own homework

we built a machine to stop us from believing our own agent's code works. the rule underneath it: a model can never be the judge of whether the model succeeded.

007

build by accretion: how i actually work with an AI on visual stuff

the honest version of working with an AI on visual things: drop one thing, look, adjust — and why that beats writing a big spec you can't picture yet.

2026-06 · craft
006

structure-as-control beats prompt-roulette

the usual way to get a composition out of an image model is to describe it and re-roll until the dice land. give it the geometry instead — and stop asking the slot machine to be your camera operator.

2026-06 · tooling
005

three companies, one brain, and a bot that brags

we gave three companies' nightly reports three different personalities — and the personality, not the automation, turned out to be the point.

2026-06 · visibility
004

capslock: opening the notebook

we've been quiet for a while, building. this is the lab opening the notebook — starting with the bet behind all of it: the useful part of ai is almost never the part everyone's excited about.

2026-06 · launch
003

nudge: a system to keep things moving

most productivity tools quietly work against you — more pressure, more guilt. we built the opposite, and learned that friction is emotional before it's operational.

2026-02 · experiment
002

a shared IT department, across companies

something we figure out for one company becomes something we can apply at the next — not by copying it whole, but by reusing the parts that fit.

2026-01 · shared edge
001

why we build from el salvador

the building could happen anywhere. what el salvador gives us is the setup — incentives, proximity, and a reason to grow this here, in place.

2025-12 · context