If an AI agent can turn a device into almost anything, how do you know what to ask for? A familiar shape gives you somewhere to start. At @inanimate_tech, we’ve been exploring this with Stick and Watch, off-the-shelf ESP32 dev kits from @M5Stack running our agent-generated code. A round screen suggests a clock, or a face. Two buttons on top suggest a stopwatch. Those familiar forms gave us ideas about what to ask our agent to make. @genmon made animated faces, an egg timer you could flip over, and I made a barbecue timer that became an unexpected breakthrough. The shape of the object helped us imagine what its behaviour could become. This is Prototyping: Why an “Anything” Device Needs a Familiar Shape.

Agent nooks, infinite calendars, birthday candles, vibeometers - and emoji machines. These are some of the device concepts we’ve been exploring for WORKS - our fast-to-market, limited-release promptable products, built in public and tested in the open. Each one offers a different way for agents to inhabit everyday objects. In the last episode, we took you inside the Approach design studio. This time, @genmon and I tour the sprawling Figma board behind the process - and the fifty concepts the team worked up. Throughout the design process, we’ve moved between methodical exploration and intuition. A framework helps you explore a direction. An odd reference sparks a conversation. Something catches your attention, and you follow it. Where did we end up? An agent with its own little nook on a shelf. A calendar that helps you see the flow of your day. An object that reflects the mood of a room back to you. We can’t build them all. We need to pick five. It's a balance between what people might want and what we can actually make. This is where we are with @inanimate_tech: sharing the possibilities while we’re still working out what they should become. This is WORKS in Progress EP3: Exploring Our Maze of AI Hardware Concepts.

This was our second major prototype at @inanimate_tech. It's a desk clock you talk to. When you talk to another person, you can tell whether you’ve caught their attention. Eye contact helps you know they’re listening. What might these cues look like in a physical device inhabited by an AI agent? Enter: TIME P1. This was our first prototype with a microphone. Our first device that you could prompt to change it's behaviour using just your voice. No keyboard or prototype web UI. Its small round screen let us experiment with that sense of attention, while its display and buttons gave the agent ways to respond to what we asked. Living with it also gave us room to discover what it could become. A request for a Tamagotchi ended up on the clock by accident, and the agent made it work using text and buttons. I started using it as a Pomodoro timer, hooked up to my task list on @BearNotesApp via MCP, counting completed tasks as I worked. These experiments are part of how we’re developing Promptable Products at Inanimate: exploring how agents translate intention into behaviour, and how these devices find a place in everyday life. This is Prototyping: "Why We Built a Desk Clock You Can Talk To."

An AI device’s form shapes what you imagine it can do long before you switch it on. That’s what we’re exploring with our industrial design partners in East London. We’re still in the concepting phase for WORKS: gathering references, sketching possibilities, and asking what familiar objects and human roles might teach us about new kinds of AI devices. There are hundreds of ideas on the table. The challenge is to make something familiar enough to invite you in, but still open-ended enough for you and the agent to create a unique experience. In EP1, we talked about why AI hardware needs more imagination. This week, you get to see our process up close. We are deep in it now! This is part of our promise to build @inanimate_tech in the open: sharing the sketches, conversations and practical questions while the products are still taking shape. WORKS in Progress EP2: Designing the Next Generation of AI Devices.

The problem with a device that can do anything is that you have to imagine what to ask it to do. Physical form changes that. A clock, lamp, or calendar gives you a way in. It constrains an agent just enough to make its possibilities easier to imagine. We don’t know yet what the right forms for agentic hardware are. WORKS is how we find out. WORKS are @inanimate_tech's fast-to-market, limited-release promptable products, built in public and tested in the open. @genmon and I sat down with @alouneou for a glass of wine and a chat about imagination bottlenecks, how physical form might help, and the wider cultural conversation that promptable products are becoming part of. This is WORKS in Progress EP1: Why AI Hardware Needs More Imagination.

Agents have arrived. But what happens when they leave our screens and start inhabiting the room around us? At @inanimate_tech, we're building WORKS to find out: a special release of Promptable Products - physical devices that understand intention and do what you mean. WORKS will be a fast to market, limited run that you can own. A way to get our ideas into your hands, and find out how people use agentic devices in the real world. We are shipping four (maybe five) devices. They are made to live in the home office - some on the desk, some on the shelves. They all run our natural UI and they work on the Inanimate platform. And they ship in Autumn 2026. We could have gone stealth and popped-up with a pristine launch video in Techtember. But that doesn't really help the conversation around what it's like to live with agents. Instead, we're going to be "uncomfortably open" - one of our values at Inanimate. We want to experiment, learn, and do as much as we can in public, in the open. So over the coming weeks, we're going to be sharing everything we can about the process to create WORKS. We'll publish an episode each week until WORKS is out in the world... wish us luck! This is "WORKS in Progress" - our diary as we build a new consumer electronics company for the AI era.