a living record.
Thoughts, experiments and proofs from inside the lab. These are the notes we keep while we work: what we make, what breaks, and what surprises us, published as we go. Not announcements; just the work, with the door open.
experiment · 014 · latest
a synthetic usability lab for under three dollars
Our last tests asked models for an opinion. This one gave them a task and a browser, and watched where they got stuck. 36 sessions, under three dollars, and the fixes held.
24 case studies in an afternoon (the prompt was the least interesting part)
Four agents, one day, 24 case studies rebuilt. The prompt was two lines. The actual product was a rules file, a status table, and a table of 34 questions the agents refused to answer themselves.
reading a decade of your own group chat without inventing a history that never happened
Ask an AI to summarize a decade of group chat and it launders guesses into facts in the same calm voice. The fix isn't a better summary — it's refusing the summary entirely, and making every output a claim wearing a label that says how much to trust it.
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.
build by accretion: a make-and-show loop for visual work with ai
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.
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.
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.