// LAB — THE BUILD REGISTER
Everything here started as an itch and ended as a working thing — a murder mystery that runs itself, a pattern generator for the crocheter in the house, a shelf that gives streaming its shape back. All of it built with Claude. None of it commissioned. When something in the lab earns a name of its own, it moves downstairs. One already has.
| 001 | The Marked Card | v2 IN PLAYTEST |
|---|---|---|
| 002 | Hooked | READY TO SHIP |
| 003 | Spine Shelf | SOFTWARE DONE |
| 004 | M5 Dial | ON ORDER |
| — two objects, one backend — | ||
| ★ | Roding Growth | GRADUATED |
BUILD 001
One phone. Four detectives. One of you did it. A pass-the-phone murder mystery that plays Inspector itself — private briefings, forged evidence, secret accusations, a staged reveal. The killer isn’t handed different lines; they’re handed less: two of the night’s eight shared facts are silently missing from their briefing, and the memory tests will find the gap. Started as a paper game on holiday in Cabo Verde. The paper couldn’t keep up.
STATUS — v2 IN PLAYTEST
BUILD 002
A gift, built for one user. Point a phone at anything — a frog, a mug, the cat — and get back what it would look like crocheted, plus the complete pattern to make it: UK terms only, hook sizes in millimetres, every round’s stitch count checked so the maths actually adds up. Tick each round off as you go; progress saves itself. Built because the free-pattern internet is US-terms chaos, and the crocheter in this house deserves better.
STATUS — READY TO SHIP
BUILD 003
A wall-mounted bar of CD spines for music that no longer has a body — its own object, its own install, its own reason to exist on that wall. Spotify hands over a square cover and nothing else — there’s no such thing as a digital spine, so every one is generated from scratch: the cover’s dominant colour, the title, and a contrast calculation that keeps it readable. Tap a spine, it widens to the cover; tap again, it plays on the Sonos. The screen never touches audio — it’s a shelf that tells the speakers what to do. A Kickstarter ad promised this. It hasn’t shipped. This has.
STATUS — SOFTWARE DONE · AWAITING HARDWARE
BUILD 004
A record spinning on the kitchen counter, golf-ball sized. Whatever’s playing shows as a generated record label — artist arced over the top, track underneath, the label’s colour extracted from the real cover — slowly rotating, the way a record does. Turn the dial for volume, press for pause, hold to skip. Same brain as the Spine Shelf; the device itself is deliberately not very smart. It has never seen a password.
STATUS — HARDWARE ORDERED · FIRMWARE NEXT
GRADUATED — 2025
Started as a lab question: why does every accountant, solicitor and financial planner in town say the same three things? It left the lab as a patch-exclusive positioning practice for the professional firms of Essex and East London — one firm per patch, no sharing. The only build so far to earn its own name. The bar stays there.
Everything on this page was built the same way I build for clients: decide fast, make the thing, test it against reality. If your firm needs that pointed at something that matters, that's the day job.
SEE THE WORK →