history
the lab, sourced and dated — the reconvening, the manifesto years, the prototypes, the track era, and the tenth year.
the reconvening2015–2017
the three heroku co-founders reconvene to study industrial research labs — parc, bell labs, menlo park — and the lab takes shape: an llc, a github org, a website, and the first version of automerge.
- 2015the heroku founders reconveneadam wiggins, james lindenbaum, and orion henry — the three heroku co-founders — reconvene after years scattered across other work. wiggins: 'somewhere around — i think it was 2015 is when we — let's say we reconvened.' they take a deep dive on the industrial research labs that shaped the industry: xerox parc, bell labs, edison's menlo park. the founding-year discrepancy is documented — directories say 2015; the lab counts 'turns ten' in 2026.
- 2015-08-19the github org appearsthe inkandswitch github organization is created — the earliest artifact of the lab's existence. directories (linkedin, cb insights) also list 'founded 2015'; cb insights adds a london hq and a blueyard capital 'unattributed vc' entry that no lab source confirms.
- 2017-04the json crdt papermartin kleppmann and alastair beresford publish 'a conflict-free replicated json datatype' in ieee transactions on parallel and distributed systems — the cambridge research automerge is built on. kleppmann is a collaborator and co-author, never an employee.
- 2017-05-27inkandswitch.com existsthe earliest wayback capture of inkandswitch.com — the lab is publicly addressable by mid-2017 even though the earliest surviving full homepage is march 2018.
- 2017automerge createdautomerge is created by kleppmann together with orion henry, peter van hardenberg, roshan choxi, and adam wiggins. the original repository carries the line 'copyright 2017, ink & switch llc, and university of cambridge' — direct evidence the lab operated as an llc by 2017.
the manifesto years2018–2019
the early lab publishes its program in public — pixelpusher, slow software, capstone, end-user programming — then the two essays that defined it: local-first software and muse.
- 2018-02-01pixelpusherthe pixelpusher essay — real-time peer-to-peer collaboration with react, an early automerge-based prototype written by van hardenberg. the lab's research-in-public pattern starts here.
- 2018-02mcgranaghan joins as pimark mcgranaghan joins as principal investigator (linkedin-reported tenure through 2019-06); van hardenberg is already active — the supporters page later counts '8 years of support' for him as of ~2026.
- 2018-03-30'privately-funded industrial research lab'the earliest full homepage capture reads: 'we are a privately-funded industrial research lab working on computing for creators' — linking livebook, trellis, and the pixelpusher essay. the private funding is the founders' own.
- 2018-11-01slow software'slow software' — mcgranaghan and wiggins on why software feels slow and what latency does to thought — plus the tablet platform showdown. the latency essay becomes the lab's first big hacker news artifact (438 points).
- 2018-12-11capstone: a tablet for thinkingcapstone — 'a tablet for thinking': mixed-media cards and freeform inking on an infinite canvas. the source later lands on github; the project is discontinued by design, a research artifact rather than a product.
- 2019-03-01the end-user programming essaythe end-user programming essay reaches 'back forty years' — the memex-to-dynabook canon — to ask why empowering users to shape their own tools has stayed so hard. the question never leaves the lab.
- 2019-04-01the local-first essay'local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud' — kleppmann, wiggins, van hardenberg, mcgranaghan. seven ideals (fast, multi-device, offline, collaborative, longevity, privacy, user control); crdts positioned as 'a foundation for a new generation of software.' presented at onward! '19 that october; 137 semantic scholar citations by 2026-09.
- 2019-04-04the muse essay'muse: designing a studio for ideas' — mcgranaghan, keskin, wiggins, roggatz. a physical-workspace-inspired ipad tool for thinking; the prototype that becomes the spinout.
- 2019muse spins outin the summer the muse team creates muse software, inc.; ink & switch contributes the existing ip in exchange for a stake. mcgranaghan's principal-investigator tenure ends the same season. it is the lab's only consumer spinout.
the prototype years2020–2023
pushpin, cambria, backchannel, peritext, crosscut, potluck, inkbase, untangle, upwelling — a run of research prototypes, automerge's production rewrite, and the muse restructuring that was never the lab's.
- 2020-04-14pushpinpushpin — 'towards production-quality peer-to-peer collaboration,' the most developed early prototype, with real internal usage documented in the essay. the stack underneath (automerge + dat → hypermerge) later becomes a dead end; the repo is archived 'for posterity' and handed to community developers.
- 2020-10-06cambriacambria — bidirectional lenses for schema change in distributed software. the essay argues data should translate between shapes so documents outlive their schemas; the lenses never reach production.
- 2020-10pvh becomes lab directorpeter van hardenberg becomes lab director (linkedin dates the role from 2020-10; the supporters page and later interviews confirm the title). wiggins has shifted to the muse spinout; no public announcement of the handover itself exists.
- 2021-09-01backchannelbackchannel — relationship-based digital identity, where trust comes through introductions rather than platform accounts. predecessor work to the later keyhive track.
- 2021-10goethals joinsmarcel goethals joins as a researcher on what becomes the programmable ink track — inkling, sketchy calendar, and playbook all carry his name.
- 2021-11-23peritext and the notion partnershipperitext — a crdt for rich-text collaboration. the supporters page later identifies it as the output of the notion research partnership; ivan zhao's quote attests the collaboration.
- 2022-03-29crosscutcrosscut — drawing dynamic models: pen-and-paper directness with software dynamism. the programmable ink track's first essay.
- 2022-06the berlin unconferencethe lab gathers for the berlin unconference alongside ecoop22's programming local-first software workshop; a buchstabenmuseum visit seeds the letterforms that become tenfold four years later.
- 2022-10-31potluckpotluck — 'dynamic documents as personal software' (litt, schoening, shen, sonnentag): text notes enriched gradually into apps via live searches, computations, and dynamic annotations. presented at splash 2022.
- 2022-11-20inkbase: programmable inkinkbase — 'what would be possible if hand-drawn sketches were programmable like spreadsheets?' the programmable ink manifesto becomes the lab's second-biggest artifact on hacker news (675 points).
- 2023-01automerge 2.0automerge 2.0 — 'our first supported release resulting from a ground-up rewrite': a rust core with wasm/js bindings, and alex good brought on full-time for support, docs, and release management. sponsors: fly.io, prisma, bowtie, plus patreon supporters of kleppmann. the library turns from research code into sponsored open-source infrastructure.
- 2023-01litt joins; untanglegeoffrey litt joins the staff as senior researcher after years as an outside collaborator (cambria, peritext, potluck) — he goes on to lead the malleable software track. the same month: untangle, pen-based fuzzy-constraint solving with an smt solver.
- 2023-03-08upwellingupwelling — real-time collaboration plus version control for writers, with 'creative privacy' while every change is still accounted for. the precursor of the patchwork track.
- 2023-09muse's 'end of an era' — not the lab'smetamuse episode 83, 'end and beginning,' is billed as 'the end of an era for muse': wiggins and most of the team depart, and adam wulf continues muse as a solo entrepreneur. the phrase belongs to the product, not the lab — no ink & switch wind-down exists in the record.
the track era2023–2025
the lab formalizes: the dispatch, three named research tracks, patchwork and keyhive notebooks, the first local-first conf, a public supporters page, and the malleable software essay.
- 2023-10the unconference seasontwo unconferences in one season: st. louis alongside the final strange loop in september, then lisbon after splash 2023 with ~100 friends of the lab, co-hosted with fission and dxos.
- 2023-11-21dispatch launches; embarkthe dispatch launches ('on embark and lude') and the embark essay publishes the same week — dynamic documents for travel planning. dispatch 001 describes the lab as 'about a dozen researchers around the world' on three tracks: local-first software, programmable ink, malleable software.
- 2024-02the patchwork notebook openspatchwork — 'project 030,' the universal version control track — begins publishing public lab notes (litt, sonnentag, schoening, van hardenberg, and wiggins back on research). alexander obenauer is active as researcher-in-residence; lu wilson joins the program.
- 2024-02-10the hollywood model, on recordidea machines #50 publishes the van hardenberg interview — the lab's self-account: the founding trio 'wanted to do a startup,' the 'hollywood model' of project-assembled contractors, 'between sort of like eight and 15 people,' and the goal 'to sustain for 10 years, for 50 years.'
- 2024-05-30the first local-first conflocal-first conf 2024 in berlin — 'the world's first local-first conference,' co-organized by lab-adjacent people including wiggins; lab members including kleppmann, good, and wiggins attend. traction was real-world: the hn announcement drew 3 points.
- 2024-08keyhive and jacquardtwo new notebooks open: keyhive ('project 035' — access control for local-first apps; zelenka, mumm, good) and jacquard (versioning and provenance for empirical science papers). zelenka leads keyhive as her fission cto tenure winds down the following month.
- 2024-10-26the la unconferencethe los angeles unconference at 'the preserve' alongside splash; the lab visits john underkoffler and andy milburn's studio. inkling is presented at live 2024 the same season.
- 2024-12-23the year-end letterdispatch 008, the year-end letter: 'a decade into our research…' — droste's lair (rir elliott evans with josh horowitz) and the first backstitch sneak preview.
- 2025-02ambsheetsthe ambsheets notebook opens — a spreadsheet for exploring scenarios and uncertainty (warth, litt, bryant; later a live 2025 paper).
- 2025-05-23repo 2.0, the 3.0 beta, and the supporters pagedispatch 011 is a dense one: automerge repo 2.0 (may 13) and the automerge 3.0 beta — orion henry's in-memory columnar rewrite with 'memory savings of 100x in some cases'; sketchy calendar (goethals, sonnentag); an endless foundation godot-collaboration call for testers; and a rebuilt website answering 'one of our most frequently-asked questions — information about how our research is funded.'
- 2025-06-05the malleable software essay'malleable software: restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps' — litt, horowitz, van hardenberg, matthews. the lab's second flagship essay: 'a software ecosystem where anyone can adapt their tools to their needs with minimal friction.'
- 2025-07automerge 3.0automerge 3.0 releases — the columnar rewrite in production: 'pasting moby dick into an automerge 2 document consumes 700mb of memory, in automerge 3 it only consumes 1.3mb' (vendor-reported benchmarks). 353 points on hn.
the tenth year2025–
the tenth year — the aria safeguarded ai programme, gaios, a wave of new researchers, backstitch at godotcon, tenfold itself, and a lab day at local-first conf 2026.
- 2025-09-22the aria programmedispatch 013: ink & switch joins the uk aria safeguarded ai programme — a ~2.5-year funded programme involving substantial uk-based work, which will require open-sourcing patchwork. john mumm rejoins; chee rabbits had joined weeks earlier; monthly automerge community calls begin. geoffrey litt departs for notion the same month.
- 2025-11-27gaios and the staff wavedispatch 014 introduces gaios — a malleable, collaborative platform derived from patchwork for the aria sgai programme — and a staff wave: grjte (ex-bain capital crypto), maciek sakrejda (postgres tooling), orion reed (folkjs, tentpole). subduction, a deterministic-chunking sync engine, joins keyhive and beelay in the infra stack.
- 2025-11backstitch goes publicbackstitch — formerly codenamed beckett, the endless os foundation-funded version control and collaboration tool for students learning godot — publishes its first lab note; lilith duncan (ex-unity) joins and the team demos at godotfest munich.
- 2026-04-23tenfold — the lab turns tentenfold and dispatch 016: 'ink & switch turns ten this year.' a tenth-anniversary interactive piece built inside patchwork — letters-as-tools by staff, alums, and friends; story by todd matthews; playground engineered by ivy reese. lab day at local-first conf announced.
- 2026-04backstitch at godotconlilith duncan presents backstitch at godotcon — 'beyond git: real-time version control for godot' — to what dispatch 018 calls a 'euphoric response'; the discord fills and a shipping game is already built with it.
- 2026-05-28wiggins returns for a residencydispatch 017: patchwork progress notes; adam wiggins returns to the lab for a research residency — firehose, a personal algorithm for triaging the stream of email and messages; local-first conf 2026 announced for july 12–14 in berlin.
- 2026-06-30the 2026 staff wavedispatch 018: mimi reyburn's residency converts to staff; rir derek yen (nyu cryptography) formalizes beekem; leo stewen joins for coln, a local-first proof-checking database for the aria work; livelymerge — dan ingalls and alex warth building 'a smalltalk / lively kernel-like system that rides on top of automerge.'
- 2026-07-12lab day at local-first conf 2026local-first conf 2026 runs july 12–14 at festsaal kreuzberg, berlin, with an ink & switch 'lab day' sharing patchwork, playbook, and automerge. monthly 'this month in automerge' posts continue through at least august.
AI-drafted at Ben Guo's direct request and credited to Hraness; every claim links to its cataloged source.