design
Design shapes the interaction. The sketch is a hypothesis about how a system should feel to inspect.
# permissionless innovation — science with privileges
Our research investigates human and AI experience for everything from local development to critical production systems
a poke with a hint, then a ranged pull
Webhooks should not deliver truth in flight. A signed, content-free poke plus a cursor-owned ranged pull turns every delivery failure into latency instead of corruption.
gain control over your agentic work by separating the intent from the execution
Apps may request agentic work, but users control review, execution, routing, and result release.
the terminal, with the amnesia removed
Twenty-plus years of daily terminal use, and the verdict is in: terminals and shells both suck — not at the edges, at the defaults. Warp, Fig, and nushell each fixed a symptom; the model survived them all.
user-controlled meta-apps over the web
Layers are independent apps that run on top of existing websites, with their own domains, permissions, identity, data, UI, communities, and economic models.
structured attachments — portable artifacts with affordances
Attachments that carry data, schema, behavior, provenance, and executable handles across email, decentralized social protocols, documents, WASM, MCP (Model Context Protocol), GraphQL, and other introspectable systems.
context tags with lifecycles, not participant-scoped streams
Apple, Google, and carriers could ship contag inboxes tomorrow as an opt-in UI feature — context lists, lifecycle chips, per-contag unread. Nothing stops SMS, RCS, MMS, and iMessage clients from adding it; `#tags` work without them.
code is a graph, not files in folders
The current disruption is a forcing function: to delegate work you must say what you mean, declaratively and intentionally — and once you do, API boundaries move to where they should have been all along.
machine-readable domain observability
A governed surface for seeing what machines try to discover about an organization, then publishing and monitoring the metadata they need.
enforceable near-real-time spend limits — before the agent loop finishes
Monthly invoice alerts don't stop an agent looping right now. CloudCap puts enforceable spend limits at the proxy — trip in milliseconds when a limit spec is violated, not when the billing cycle closes.
field agents on every page — rhetoric, operationalized
Page-local research agents that continuously map the living field around each investigation on this site: prior art, credible actors, felt pain, counterexamples, and translations for whoever just arrived.
method
We study systems as we build and use them
Design shapes the interaction. The sketch is a hypothesis about how a system should feel to inspect.
Implementation exposes the constraints. If it can't be built, the idea wasn't finished.
Evaluation turns use into evidence. Deployed prototypes are the lab's instruments.
We look at every problem through several lenses, focused on revealing what is essential complexity and what is accidental complexity.
How would we achieve this with the stack the team already trusts — and what does that cost?
How would we achieve it (or reformulate it, or avoid it entirely) with the best available tools — and what does that cost?
How would we achieve it if nothing existed yet — and what does that cost? The gap between the three answers is the accidental complexity.
What is the shortest path from an idea to a working product?
How much of our work is the problem, and how much is the packaging? What can we do about the packaging?
What is the shortest path from not knowing how to program to being able to make something?
The flywheel: better tools make teaching and learning faster, which makes the next tool better. Exhaust becomes tutorials; sessions become examples; learners become teachers.
faq
“How do I sandbox a coding agent?” “Why didn't my webhook fire?” “Feature folders or layer folders?” — real questions, answered by showing why the framing can't produce a good answer, and which investigation it routes to.
limbo
Not everything here has collapsed into a project yet. The uncommitted ideas live in superposition on a tasting menu, served by the house — order one enough times and it graduates.
collaboration
Collaborating with builders, labs, standards groups, institutions, and communities working near interfaces, protocols, environments, provenance, evaluation, and machine-readable surfaces.