About
A laboratory,
run like a workshop.
Who is behind this, how it is actually operated, and what we are trying to find out.
01
Why build the tools first
It would be quicker to write applications that use somebody else’s document format, somebody else’s workflow engine and somebody else’s telephony. We did not, and the reason is specific rather than ideological.
If you want to find out what software can do when it is given real tools, you need tools that will let you all the way in. Almost every hosted product is designed to stop exactly there: you get the surface it wants you to have. A document you cannot open programmatically is not a document, it is a picture of one.
So the stack is ours down to the metal — the application, the database, the storage, the mail transport, the signalling that sets up a call, the model server the agents run on. That is a slower way to build a company and we would not recommend it to everyone. What it buys is that when we want to try something, no part of the answer is “their API does not expose that”.
The second consequence matters more to a customer than to us. Your messages, files and mail sit on hardware we are accountable for, and the list of other companies involved is short enough to print.
02
How it is actually run
| Who | A small team, and a staff of AI agents that work alongside them in the office described on the front page. Everybody here builds; there is no layer of people whose job is to talk about the work. |
|---|---|
| Where it runs | Our own machines, administered by us, rather than rented as a managed service with our name on it. |
| What we depend on | Two companies: one hosts the servers, one carries outbound email. Both are named on the privacy page. Two is a short enough list to publish, and publishing it is the point. |
| Calls | Browser to browser wherever the network allows it. The audio and video do not pass through us. |
| Cookies | Two, once you sign in: the session itself, and a hint that carries nothing and lets a page know you are signed in before it has to ask. The chat widget on these public pages keeps its own conversation in your browser’s local storage. |
| Measurement | No analytics scripts, no advertising tags, no third-party trackers, and no cookie on the public pages. The web server keeps a standard access log; how many people read each problem is counted from that log and from nothing else. The one other thing we keep is a vote: when you press “I have this problem too” we store a salted, one-way hash of your address so the same person cannot vote twice. It cannot be reversed, it is not joined to anything, and it tells us nothing about what else you looked at. Everything we do count is on the numbers page. |
| Backups | Daily. Fourteen days of restore points, checked automatically. |
| Accounts | Made by an administrator. There is no self-serve sign-up, and no free tier waiting to be upgraded. |
| Revenue | Not meaningful yet. This is a laboratory that intends to become a business, and it is more useful to you to know that than to read a number we made up. |
03
What we hold to
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Show the working.
A machine that does a job and cannot tell you how is a machine you have to take on faith. Everything here reports what it did, in enough detail to be argued with.
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Friction goes. Agency stays.
We take out the steps that were never really the work. What to do next, and whether to do it at all, stays with a person.
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The difficulty belongs in the problem.
Not in operating the tool you solve it with. A great deal of software gets this backwards and calls the result power.
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Say what is not finished.
Half of this is unfinished and some of it will be abandoned. A page that hides that is a page you cannot use to make a decision.
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We are our own first customer.
The company runs on this. Anything tedious gets fixed, because we are the ones being bored by it.
04
Working with us
We take on work, and we are straightforward about the shape of it. You will be talking to the people who wrote the thing you are asking about, which is the good half. The other half is that we are small, so we say no to work we cannot do well — easier to respect in a supplier than to enjoy in one.
We use everything on the front page ourselves, every day, for everything. The company’s own mail, documents, calls and boards are those ones. Anything tedious gets fixed quickly because we are the ones being bored by it, which is a worse business model and a much better feedback loop.
A student with an essay, someone freelancing at a kitchen table, a team of eight, a company of a thousand. The scale changes. The arithmetic does not.