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And so to Brighton — and victory

Power move would be to eat them

I’ve never worked so hard in such a direct and sustained way as I am today. Possibly summer 2003. V fulfilling. Hopefully decent results too but proof will be, as they say, in the pudding

New Lab Notes from @inanimate_tech: device simulators in-browser, launch planning underway, and @betaworks Demo Day video released. We’re bringing WORKS closer to production. Plus my take on Francis Bourgeois and enthusiasm as an antidote to cynicism. Subscribe ↓ news.inanimate.tech/p/lab-no…

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.

Yesterday is going to look nice on the Duo. Seems like a lot of grass to bring the horizon up to the fold in "laptop" mode but I think it'll look pretty effective irl

Totally genius. First I assumed it would be pointless but downloaded and boom! It’s genuinely useful!! 10/10

I ran my second marathon last weekend but my write-up went a bit weird, sorry interconnected.org/home/2026…

Finally a replacement for the mighty weathernerd, relative weather is absolutely better than absolute weather and there is a new best weather app ever

this is the Put-That-There realization we’ve been waiting for

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."

1. this is working 2. I am fried

This was @inanimate_tech's very first prototype of a Promptable Product. We call it TIME P1. To us, it is an ancient object. You learn different things when an idea leaves the breadboard and starts living on your desk as a prototype. We had four of these TIME devices on our desks for nearly a year. They let us explore what happens when an AI agent controls a physical product. Living with TIME pushed our thinking on generative UI. As both lamp and ambient display, it exposed the challenges in making one object do two things really well.

had to drive across town today. chatted with ChatGPT Voice Mode via CarPlay about greek myths the whole way now voice has web search, chats can get really expansive. and it kept quiet while I dealt with traffic killer app. I wrote about this in 2025! interconnected.org/home/2025…