Tech to augment your environment & increase your agency.
London, UK
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Hello World! We are @inanimate_tech.
+ We see a future of Universal Ambient Intelligence.
+ We believe in togetherness.
+ We are building technology to augment your environment and increase your agency.
Follow our journey: news.inanimate.tech/subscrib…
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Inanimate devices can become whatever you imagine. Yes, even that.
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.
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A head of steam is building.
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…
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Wait, are we making a cat keyboard...?
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.
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We built a desk clock controlled by an AI agent that you can talk to. Here’s why.
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."
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Inanimate retweeted
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.
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Inanimate retweeted
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.
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Inanimate retweeted
New @inanimate_tech Lab Notes: design signed off, circuit boards landed, cameras rolling.
We’re taking WORKS from prototype to production and learning how to talk in video.
And! @genmon on how desks evolved - and designing them for agents.
Subscribe ↓ news.inanimate.tech/p/lab-no…
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Inanimate retweeted
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.
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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.
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We’re making devices to bring agents into the real world. We call them Promptable Products. We believe one day all devices will work this way.
Come with us. First video. Hi Mum!
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Inanimate retweeted
13th edition of @inanimate_tech New Lab Notes drops at 1pm today.
This week:
⌚️ A smartwatch built using Inanimate by Ben Brown
🏗️ A prototyping update - persistence, gesture, Slack bot IRL, and devices that can see and breath
🌆 @genmon shares his love of tiny cityscapes
Subscribe here and get it straight into your inbox.
news.inanimate.tech/subscrib…
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Inanimate retweeted
this is awesome
ben brown used Resident to vibe code his new ESP32 watch
best quote:
> this thing starts off with nothing and you just wish your features into being one by one
piped.video/watch?v=qAUz0PWa…
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RT @danielfogg: The family is coming over this weekend. I'm going to roast a chicken. 90mins in the oven, 15mins to rest.
I built a thing…
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Inanimate retweeted
Matt Jones has been using @inanimate_tech Resident for light-painting emojis (a theme he has returned to many times over the years).
Lovely write-up of his experiments here: petafloptimism.com/2026/06/1…
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Inanimate retweeted
I’ve been playing around with our tech. I used @inanimate_tech Resident and our Claude Skill to vibe-code a productivity app onto an @M5Stack Stick.
I built… Intention Beads 📿.
Inspired by a theory of work and anchored in spiritual practice, they turn intention into a daily ritual.
Here’s how it works.
State your purpose to create a unique bead. Take action towards that purpose to add the bead to your string.
Every day, a new intention and a completed action creates a new bead. Over time, the string becomes a visible record of your intentions made real.
Fun stuff I threw in.
🔷Unique beads are generated from the intention itself - colour, shape, effect all varies.
🔷Flicking the beads five times uses the accelerometer to confirm the action is complete
🔷Celebration melody plays on completion - it’s Horace Andy’s “Money is the Route of All Evil”
This is not our product. It’s a third-party device running our tech.
So what are we doing here?
We have a theory that we’re about to see an explosion of devices that allow personal behaviours, rituals, and workflows to be embodied directly in physical objects. Some of these will be one-shot, ephemeral apps. Some will be long-lasting, but unique to you and your bespoke, messy use case. Like this one.
These are promptable products that enable fast feedback loops between a person and an intelligence. All unbundled from your phone and laptop, and embodied in the real world on strange new AI-driven physical devices.
Want to build something too?
Check out: resident.inanimate.tech + use our Claude Skill.
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Inanimate retweeted
a few more…
the thing that I’m poking at is the relationship between form and function
“personal software” works because our sw surfaces are already mutable
but when product behavior changes on a whim? how do you design for that?
destabilising.
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Inanimate retweeted
wired up the accel/gyro to the Resident sandbox
10 points to whoever makes the first m5stick app that does iBeer
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Wrapped! This was such a great experience!
@betaworks is a special place, made that way by special people. It sits at the centre of a community, which we @inanimate_tech are thrilled to be part of.
In Oct 2025 (before OpenClaw, Hermes, Mac Mini shortage) we picked the theme for our next Camp: Agent Systems.
Over 400 companies applied. We picked eleven.
Last week was their Demo Day, and they crushed it. We're so excited to share them with you:
betaworks.com/writing/spring…
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Inanimate retweeted
Part of the thesis at @inanimate_tech is agents are beginning to act in the real world, and to do that well they need to be able to run code
Like, our personal AIs can now drive my desktop apps. Why can't they drive the products in my office and home too?
Why can't I vibe code a whole generative personal app that makes use of all the electronics around me?
It's hard to see how we reach that future: Smart home protocols are too limited and too high latency. At the other end of the spectrum, imagine I could get my agent to re-write the firmware of all my devices for whatever purpose I have a dozen times a day -- is that going to be reliable? Or safe?
We open sourced our answer to this today... it's called Resident.
Resident is a code sandbox for ESP32 devices. It's aimed at device developers, and it lets them bring infinite reprogrammability to their devices for all their end users.
(We love ESP32: it's a unique microcontroller family as it is used equally by makers, new hardware startups, and in mass production. Plus it has on-board wi-fi and a great ecosystem.)
Sandboxes let you expose only the capabilities you choose -- and then the code can do anything.
Once the developer adds the sandbox, it goes like this:
- User says their intent
- The agent reads the device capabilities doc: what IO does it have? What are its characteristics?
- Then the agent writes code...
- ...pushes the code to the device... (we provide a back-end server and websocket connectivity)
- ...and the code runs in the on-device Resident sandbox.
Boom, hot reload device functionality 💥
We've been using Resident for the last couple of months for prototyping new products and new use cases. It'll be at the heart of the experience for our future products.
What we've learnt already is that infinite reprogrammability is powerful... but weird! It changes product archetypes fundamentally. We're going to have to figure out this new world together.
Which is why we're sharing Resident for anyone to use.
It comes with the same stack of agent skills that we use to quickly bring up new device prototypes and craft new apps for them.
We're looking forward to sharing as we build, and would love for you to get involved too.
👉 Resident
resident.inanimate.tech
- Learn about integrating Resident (compatible with esp-idf and Arduino for prototyping)
- Get the agent skills to create and push new sandbox apps
- Try it instantly using the browser-based simulator
👉 More...
We believe that on-device sandboxes are a foundational primitive for AI irl. I go deep on this topic on my blog
interconnected.org/home/2026…
Here's the GitHub — I'd love it if you gave us a star 🤩
github.com/inanimate-tech/re…
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Inanimate retweeted
Just shipped this week's Lab Notes for @inanimate_tech . 370 subscribers. Super engaged. Enjoying the journey.
Follow along here: news.inanimate.tech/p/lab-no…
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