ink & switch is the industrial research lab the heroku founders built instead of a startup: a dozen researchers, patron-funded, working in public on tools for thought. in ten years it coined 'local-first,' built automerge, spun out muse, and published the essays — slow software, inkbase, malleable software — that turned a small lab into a movement's reference point. this is the sourced record: the reconvening, the manifestos, the prototypes, the patrons, and the model itself.
48 sourced events · 34 cataloged writings · 42 coverage items · 190 sources · researched by parallel agent lanes
history the lab, sourced and dated — the reconvening, the manifesto years, the prototypes, the track era, and the tenth year. the reconvening 2015–2017 — the heroku founders reconvene, the llc and the github org appear, automerge begins. the manifesto years 2018–2019 — pixelpusher, slow software, capstone, and the two essays that defined the lab. the prototype years 2020–2023 — pushpin through upwelling, automerge's rewrite, and muse's end of an era. the track era 2023–2025 — the dispatch, the three named tracks, the notebooks, and the first local-first conf. the tenth year 2025– — the aria programme, gaios, backstitch at godotcon, and the lab turning ten. people the founders, the director, the bench, the residents, and the collaborators — who they are and what they wrote. the founders adam wiggins, james lindenbaum, orion henry — and peter van hardenberg, the director. the writing the essay and interview corpus — the manifestos, the changelog, idea machines, and the retrospectives. the lab the research bench, the researchers-in-residence, the outside collaborators, and the supporters. interviews and talks the interviews and talks where the model got said out loud — changelog, idea machines, localfirst.fm. the philosophy tools for thought, patronage over venture, the essay as artifact — and the attribution debates. side quests the projects around the lab — automerge, the tracks, the prototypes, muse, the residencies, and the conference circuit. the lab's tracks automerge, patchwork, keyhive, backstitch, gaios, the sync stack, and the dispatch. the people's orbits the muse spinout and the residency projects — the work that belongs to named people. the ecosystem local-first conf and the unconferences — the community convening the lab inspired. coverage what the discourse made of the lab — the hacker news threads, the community press, and the outside analysts. the manifesto tests the manifesto tests — local-first, inkbase, malleable software meeting the front page. the infrastructure argument the infrastructure argument — automerge benchmarks, crdt critiques, and the shipping questions. the community coverage the community coverage — lofi, localfirst.fm, localfirstnews, and the conference's own press. the mainstream edge the mainstream edge — fast company on muse, the rare reach beyond the technical audience. the lab itself the lab itself — the supporters page, the notion pipeline, the directory entries. the independent reads the independent reads — matt webb, gwern, flancian, and the analysts who read the lab from outside. controversies the running debates — offline-first prior art, crdt performance, the benchmark spat, definition drift. sentiment eras sentiment eras: warm welcome → manifesto moment → engineering phase → institution → second flagship → tenth year. the idea the independent research lab as a model — the lineage it inherited, what a decade proved, and what stays open. lineage parc, bell labs, menlo park, the augmentation canon, and the cambridge crdt research the lab descends from. what the lab proved what the model demonstrated — the vocabulary, the infrastructure, the talent magnet. what stayed unfinished the essay's open problems, the substrate reset, the drift, the thin capitalization. the lab-model argument the argument about the model itself — patronage as answer, or luxury good. successors automerge's ecosystem, the alumni employers, the community, and the aria programme. open questions the questions a next attempt has to answer. sources the catalog — every source behind every claim, dated and typed. the catalog the full typed catalog — primary, interview, reporting, archive, community, repo, reference. method how this was researched — parallel agent lanes, the evidence model, and how to correct it. the lanes the two research lanes and what the formula proved. the evidence rules the evidence model — confidence, precision, sentiment discipline. known gaps what the research could not verify — recorded, not hidden. corrections how to correct the record. AI-drafted at Ben Guo's direct request and credited to Hraness; every claim links to its cataloged source.
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