Lab Work in progress, on purpose.

The Small Software That Outlives the Big Rewrite

A ChatGPT-generated engineering essay testing long-form Markdown, tables, quotes, code, diagrams, and opinionated technical writing.

writing · software-engineering · markdown

About the Lab

The Lab is where I try things that may not work. Entries here are unfinished by definition — that is the point, and it is the contract this page makes with you.

Nothing in the Lab should be read as a recommendation, a product, or a system you should depend on. When something graduates it moves to Projects, and if it becomes genuinely adoptable it moves to Products.

Current areas of exploration include AI-assisted development, local language models, voice interfaces, automation, and data visualization.

Using the Lab

The Lab is where I try things that may not work. Entries here are unfinished by definition, and none of them is a recommendation or a product to depend on.

Browse by category in the Lab’s own list. Opening an experiment shows its files: documents are rendered, source files are highlighted, and runnable pages play in a frame.

A framed experiment runs isolated from the rest of the site. Use Open in a new tab to see it full size, or when it needs something a frame cannot give it.

Getting around

The sidebar on the left lists every part of the site. The section you are in opens to show its entries. Collapse it to icons with the button at its foot; the site remembers the choice in this browser.

This panel has a strip of tab icons down its right edge; hover over one for its name. Guide explains the page you are on. Details, where a page has it, lists the properties of what you are looking at. Close the panel to give the page the full width.

Appearance, a tab in this panel, sets the colour theme, text size, density and motion. The choice is saved only in this browser.

Without JavaScript the sidebar stays open and this panel stays at the side with its Guide and Details open. Appearance needs JavaScript, because the choices are saved by the browser.