method

the lanes

the corpus was produced by two agent research lanes — history-and-people, and coverage-and-idea — each writing a lane report against one shared scratch source catalog before synthesis. the pattern is the research formula proven on the earlier dossiers: lane-prefixed source ids frozen upfront, per-claim confidence, and a declared deduplication owner merging 190 canonical sources.

the evidence rules

1. every event, quote, and claim carries at least one source id.
2. dates keep their precision — a year, a month, or a day — and approximate dates are labeled rather than sharpened.
3. confidence stays honest: confirmed, reported, and inferred are distinct claims, not stages of the same claim.
4. sources are typed by role — primary, interview, reporting, archive, community — so a claim's foundation is visible before it is read.
5. sentiment labels describe the coverage, not the truth of it.

known gaps

1. the founding year is unresolved — directories say 2015 and wiggins says the founders "reconvened" around then, while the lab says it "turns ten" in 2026; both are preserved.
2. the corporate structure beyond "ink & switch llc" (the 2017 automerge copyright line) is undocumented — no filings were found.
3. no dollar figures exist for the patronage — the supporters page names people and partner categories, not amounts; the aria programme's size is unstated.
4. cb insights lists a london hq and a blueyard capital investment that no lab source confirms.
5. several named people exist only at credit level — choxi, roggatz, keskin, mckelvey, kaliski, tognetti, peterson, cook — with no public roles or dates.
6. project internals (patchwork, gaios, playbook, backstitch) are visible almost entirely through the lab's own dispatches — self-reported by construction.
7. the sentiment corpus is mostly hacker news plus community media — a sample of the technical discourse, not the field at large.
8. whether kleppmann's role ever formalized beyond collaborator is undocumented; the record supports only the collaborator reading.

corrections

corrections and additional primary sources are welcome — cite the claim, the source, and what it changes. the catalog is designed to be audited, not just read.