Journal
Notes on product decisions, interaction design and the practice of building software.
Keep the judgment
Twelve patterns for human oversight in AI products, where software suggests and a person decides. From evidence before the approve button to a record a person can read.
The sea lion papers
Ninety research citations, every one plausible, every one fabricated — the ACL paper was boron chemistry, another was sea-lion pharmacology. What checking found, and what a clinical product owes a clinician after that.
The word before it drifted
cyber comes from the Greek for helmsman, and “governor” is the same word by a different road — what that means for a studio whose products are, literally, feedback loops with a human at the wheel.
The hardest client was us
A studio's own website is the one piece of work a client can inspect all the way down. So we treated ours as the hardest brief of the year — hand-built, with product captures and presentation studies clearly distinguished.
Nobody wrote it down
On confabulation, contextual inquiry, and why almost no software will make a decision — and what it takes to extract judgment an expert can't articulate.
The velocity gods
A working theory of how speed stopped being a means and became a faith — what the cult of shipping fast actually produces, and what it costs.
Building cyber:cyber
An honest working note on building a one-person product design lab: how it got built, what it cost, and what we're learning as the first engagements get underway.
Shipping got commoditised
Anyone with a laptop can ship a product in a weekend now. A working theory of what's actually scarce once production is free — and why so much of it is B+.
Six Things Native AI Features Get Right (That Bolted-On Ones Don't)
A field guide to the difference between AI as a feature and AI as decoration — the six decisions that separate native AI from a chat bubble in the corner.
Why cyber:cyber exists
The founding note. Why a lab rather than an agency or a studio, what we're betting on, and why the internet is drowning in B+ AI output.