Zeist

Creating things that should exist.

Royal Observatory, Greenwich, John Varley, about 1830

Tool

Timebase

Visualize and plan across time zones.

The problem

Every world clock shows the same row of cities and the same offsets. None of them tells you when the people you work with will be awake, or when the thing on your calendar happens in their day.

The approach

A row per city and colour for the hour: a continuous 24-hour gradient carries the time of day, so icons, terminators and offsets could go. One scrub gesture moves every clock at once. Countdowns to the events on your calendar, tinted by the hour where they happen.

What we learned

Colour can carry what labels usually do; once the rows carried the hour, everything else could be removed. Building the iPhone app and the web app as separate, bespoke things was faster than sharing code, and both are better for it.

iPad, Mac and watch, each designed on its own, after Shio ships.

Timebase on a phone — timebase.me, as it is today.

Status: Live on the App Store and at timebase.me
Runs on: iPhone, and the web
Since: 2026
Built with: Swift and SwiftUI on iOS; plain HTML and JavaScript on the web, no backend
Also: App Store, GitHub

Royal Observatory, Greenwich The prime meridian runs through its courtyard. Every time zone is counted from this line. John Varley, about 1830.

Eddystone Lighthouse, After Henry Roberts, 1761

Tool

Outage Observer

Live status for providers in your stack.

Open outage.observer

The problem

Every provider has a status page; nobody watches 151 of them. An outage reaches you as your own error rate, or as a post on X, before the page admits it.

The approach

One Worker polls the official status pages of 151 infrastructure and AI providers, detects each transition exactly once, and tells you where you already are: a bot in Telegram, Slack or Discord, a push, an RSS feed, the public board, or a Mac menu-bar app.

What we learned

The hard part is not polling; it is not lying. Atomic transition detection, alerts that know which region you are in, and self-hosted brand icons so nothing phones home. Bot Fight Mode blocks your own heartbeat if it hits the custom domain.

Per-provider pages with uptime history.

Outage Observer on a phone — outage.observer, as it is today.

Status: Live; launched on Product Hunt in June 2026
Runs on: The web board; Telegram, Slack and Discord bots; push, RSS; a Mac menu-bar app
Since: June 2026
Built with: One Cloudflare Worker with D1 and KV, on the free tier; a native Swift Mac app
Also: Telegram, GitHub

Eddystone Lighthouse Built on a reef off Plymouth in 1698, to warn ships about what they could not see coming. After Henry Roberts, 1761.

Tool

Primitives

Instruments for the fundamentals of design.

Open primitiv.es

The problem

Everyday design questions, like whether two colours are readable together or what a type scale steps to, are answered by scattered one-off sites. Each has its own layout, its own rounding, and rarely an answer you can send to someone.

The approach

One instrument per question, grouped by primitive, in one harness: the same controls, the same explanation and a stateful address everywhere. The maths sits in one package, JSON in and JSON out, so agents can later ask the same questions people do.

What we learned

The harness is most of the work; once it was right, a new instrument became a folder. Precision is mostly rounding: a colour written to the address has to come back as the same colour, or a contrast check passes on one screen and fails on the next.

Grid, shape and motion in turn. A public requests board orders what comes after, and the maths opens up as endpoints for agents.

Primitives on a phone — primitiv.es, as it is today.

Status: Live; Color and Type are out, eleven instruments
Runs on: The web
Since: September 2026
Built with: Astro and Svelte on one Cloudflare Worker, D1 for requests; the maths in one package, JSON in and JSON out
Also: GitHub

Paestum, Italy Greek temples about 2,500 years old, down to the column and the beam. Piranesi, 1778.

The Arsenal, Venice, Giacomo Franco, 1610

Tool

Amodal

Your coding agents, working together.

Open amodal.co

The problem

Building with coding agents makes you the glue: copying handovers between Claude Code and Codex, reconstructing plans, picking a machine, reconnecting the same tools for each agent.

The approach

One workspace per project that holds the plan, the decisions and the memory. You direct the work in one conversation, on the web or in Telegram; it goes to the right agent on the right machine, and the results and the decisions that need you come back.

What we learned

The hard part is not running agents but continuity. The plan, the decisions and the exact code checkpoint have to travel with the work, or every switch starts from zero.

Paired machines with authenticated runners, then safe dispatch and results, Claude working alongside Codex, and Telegram. Then an early-access alpha.

Status: Nearly there; the waitlist is open
Runs on: The web and Telegram, with a runner on your own machines
Since: September 2026
Built with: A hub on Cloudflare; runners on your own Mac or Raspberry Pi drive Claude Code and Codex

The Arsenal, Venice The gate of the city's shipyard, where thousands of specialists built ships together, stage by stage. Giacomo Franco, 1610.

Mount Lebanon, New York, Lossing and Barritt, from Charles Nordhoff, 1875

Tool

Intuitive Software

Build and own the tools you need.

Open intuitive.software

The problem

Small teams rent a subscription for each piece of software they use, and none of it is quite what they need. What they could make themselves is hard to host and harder to share.

The approach

A workspace on your own Cloudflare account, assembled from modules: Links, Forms, Waitlist, Surveys, Contacts, Inventory and Workflows, all sharing the same people, permissions and look. What is missing, the coding agent you already use builds inside the same rules, so it matches the rest.

What we learned

Foogl and Formweh showed that one small Worker on your own account covers much of what small teams rent. What they lacked was a shared shell: the same people, sign-in and look across everything.

The framework first, then Links and Forms in one workspace with the first workflow between them, for a private alpha.

Status: Nearly there; the waitlist is open
Runs on: The web, hosted on your own Cloudflare account
Since: September 2026
Built with: One Worker and one D1 database per workspace, in your own account; open source, AGPL
Grew from: Foogl and Formweh, now its Links and Forms modules

Mount Lebanon, New York The Shakers here built their own buildings, furniture and tools, to their own rules. Lossing and Barritt, from Charles Nordhoff, 1875.

Mont-Saint-Michel, Clarkson Stanfield and Alfred Freebairn, 1836

Tool

Shio

The cross-platform terminal for the agent era.

Open shio.sh

The problem

SSH clients on the phone are either ten years old or a subscription with somebody's cloud in the middle. Reaching your own machines should not need either.

The approach

A native SSH client for iPhone, iPad and Mac that finds your machines through Tailscale, keeps sessions alive across the day, and treats agents running on those machines as first-class.

What we learned

Nobody just chats with a local model; they want to reach the machine it runs on. The Mac reconnect state machine and trusting a new host key were harder than the terminal.

A device pass, an external TestFlight, and then a decision on whether it is the answer.

Status: Exploring; a device pass and a TestFlight away
Runs on: iPhone, iPad and Mac
Since: 2026
Built with: Swift and SwiftUI; Tailscale for reach; a native terminal core
Grew from: Pasture, once it was clear that reaching the machine mattered more than chatting with the model on it
Also: GitHub

Mont-Saint-Michel Shio can mean tide in Japanese. The highest tides still cut this island off. Clarkson Stanfield and Alfred Freebairn, 1836.

Hortus Botanicus, Leiden, Willem van Swanenburg, 1610

Tool

Medivalent

Find the equivalent of your medicines in other countries.

Open medivalent.com

The problem

Your medicine has a different name in every country. Finding the equivalent abroad means a pharmacist, luck, or a forum thread.

The approach

Match by substance rather than brand: the national medicine registers of five countries joined on WHO INN names, with brand-collision detection, so a brand from home resolves to what the pharmacy abroad stocks.

What we learned

The data exists; the join is the product. Government registers disagree on everything but the substance, and the same brand can mean a different drug in another country. The caveat is part of the design.

Whether to make it a product. Until then it stays an exploration, with the caveat in front.

Status: Exploring; it works, and it is not medical advice
Runs on: The web
Since: May 2026
Built with: Two Cloudflare Workers, D1, KV and R2; no language model at runtime

Hortus Botanicus, Leiden Founded in 1590 so that students could learn medicine from the plants themselves. Willem van Swanenburg, 1610.

Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, Paris, Thomas, 1859

Tool

Infer

A cross-platform AI browser powered by local models.

Open infer.fyi

The problem

Browsers that are intelligent and simply work across platforms are rare. The ones that exist send what you read to someone else's server, or tie you to one vendor's model.

The approach

A browser with the model inside it. Local models first, your own key when you need a bigger one, and a library of pages, files and notes that stays on your machine and can be searched and asked without leaving the window.

What we learned

The first version was a research tool, not a browser: a library you could question. The browser was the part that was missing; the library stays. Local embeddings and on-device search were enough for a personal library, and cheaper than every hosted alternative.

Make it a browser. Then make it cross-platform without making it generic.

Status: Exploring: the one we most want to pursue right now
Runs on: Mac first; iPhone and iPad are the point
Since: 2026
Built with: Swift and SwiftUI; local models through Ollama; your own key for hosted ones
Grew from: A local-first research tool: a library of links and files you could ask questions of

Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, Paris Henri Labrouste's reading room, opened in 1851 and gas-lit so that people could read after dark. Thomas, 1859.

Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, The Illustrated London News, 1859

Tool

Stem

Document your rabbit holes and discover new ones.

Open stem.md

The problem

Rabbit holes leave no trail. The links, notes and half-thoughts of a week of curiosity end up in twelve tabs and a screenshot.

The approach

Stems: document a rabbit hole as you go, from the browser, the phone or the web, and follow the trails other people left when their curiosity went the same way.

What we learned

It is about ninety percent built and it stalled on conviction, not bandwidth. The open question is whether people want to publish their curiosity, and that is a question to ask before finishing.

Gauge interest before writing more code.

Status: Exploring; most of it is built
Runs on: Web, iPhone, a Chrome extension
Since: March 2026
Built with: A web app and API, an iOS app and a browser extension, each its own repository

Mammoth Cave, Kentucky The longest known cave system in the world. Nobody has reached the end of it. The Illustrated London News, 1859.

Timebase

The problem

The approach

What we learned

Next

Outage Observer

The problem

The approach

What we learned

Next

Primitives

The problem

The approach

What we learned

Next

Amodal

The problem

The approach

What we learned

Next

Intuitive Software

The problem

The approach

What we learned

Next

Shio

The problem

The approach

What we learned

Next

Medivalent

The problem

The approach

What we learned

Next

Infer

The problem

The approach

What we learned

Next

Stem

The problem

The approach

What we learned

Next