This is a working note from the studio’s launch in May 2026. Update, October 2026: the site now separates commissioned work from owned products, and records the current stage of each case.
We're publishing this for two reasons. First, the manifesto says we build in public. The manifesto only matters if the practice does. Second, anyone considering hiring us should know how we work — what tools we trust, what we refuse, what the actual operating model looks like when the brand work is over and the production work begins.
This is week one. There will be more.
What this place actually is
cybercyber is not just a studio that takes on client work. It's an operator-led lab that builds its own products, and takes on a small number of client engagements each year that compound with the lab's own work.
This distinction matters. Client work covers brand, product design and implementation. Building our own products gives us practical experience of making and maintaining software. Each engagement still needs a clear brief, an agreed scope and evidence appropriate to its stage.
The current state of the lab: two products live in Alpha — Granite, a strength coach, and Frame, a BJJ training journal, both native iOS. Others got killed before they got this far. The discipline of refusal we sell to clients is the same discipline we apply to our own work. Most of our own ideas don't survive contact with reality, and we kill them quickly when they don't.
What this means in practice: when a client hires cybercyber, they're hiring a team that has spent the last six months in the trenches building real things, killing the ones that didn't work, and learning what does. The judgement is fresh. The patterns are current. The work is informed by the same discipline we'd apply to our own products and years in the digital product game.
What we build with
The cybercyber tooling stack, current as of week one:
- Claude Code for codebase operations, especially first-pass scaffolding and refactoring
- Cursor for IDE-based work where iteration matters more than scale
- Next.js + TypeScript + Tailwind as the default web stack — boring, reliable, fast to ship
- Anthropic API for AI features in shipped products, using Claude models
- Vercel for deployment, with Stripe for payments and Clerk for auth where needed
- Hand-written HTML, CSS and JS for the cybercyber site itself — no framework, no build step, nothing between a design decision and what ships.
- Figma for visual exploration that doesn't need to be code yet
- Linear for tracking — including the next post, which is already in the queue
The tooling is mostly conventional. The leverage isn't in the tools. The leverage is in operating the tools at full capacity, which most teams don't because most teams have meetings about how to operate them.
What's next
Update, 17 October 2026: Frame is released on iPhone and Android and now leads the portfolio alongside Kaido, which remains in private pilot. Granite is no longer a priority for the studio. The earlier working notes below describe the direction at the time of writing.
Future blog posts will be working notes from inside that work. It will not be a case study. It will be honest about what worked, what didn't, and what we'd do differently. Case studies are marketing artefacts written six months after the fact. Working notes are written while the work is still wet. The second is more useful. We'll keep doing it.
The studio is open for scoped client engagements. Current work and engagement options are on the homepage.
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cybercyber is a product design lab. We work with a small number of clients each year. You work directly with Dan, with scope and fees agreed before work starts. Email hello@cybercyber.ai.