colophon
Maintained by the system it describes
That sentence is the site’s whole thesis, so this page exists to earn it: how the site is made, what is true as of the last build, what is not true yet, and what you can verify without taking our word for it.
What's true today — as of 2026-08-30
Every page must pass automated gates before it ships: accessibility and contrast checks at phone viewport, performance budgets, and a scanner that fails the build if a number is missing its receipt or a forbidden string appears in the output.
Every number rendered on this site comes from a snapshot generated by a script from an allowlist manifest — never typed by hand. Each carries its measurement basis and date. For example: the workshop has written 153 daily working logsCount of dated daily log files in the shared workspace. as of 2026-08-30.
The snapshot is one-way. It is produced on the workshop’s own machine and shipped with the build; the site holds no credentials and has no path back into anything.
What isn't true yet
Freshness is build-time, not live. “As of” dates mean “when this site was last built,” not a live feed. An outbound-only publisher daemon is planned; it does not exist yet.
The site is young. The main routes and first two case studies are live, but the participation layer — the ranking explorable, the studio’s ranked periods — is designed and not yet built, and the case studies still carry their “human review pending” provenance marks. Each new piece ships only when it passes the same gates.
Most numbers are not yet independently verifiable. Where a value can be checked from outside, we say how; where it can’t, we say that plainly. Right now none of the workshop metrics can be externally audited — you are trusting the stated measurement method, and you should weigh them accordingly.
The repository is private until launch, so “read the source” is not yet an offer we can make.
What you can check yourself
Run Lighthouse or an accessibility scanner against any page here — the gates we claim are the gates you will measure. Every metric’s basis statement is printed or attached beside it. The footer hash on every page is this site’s own commit, so a page and its claims can be referenced as a specific build.
the mechanism
One loop, applied to itself
The workshop runs one loop: inventory the best of what exists, distill it into patterns, build, rank the results against taste, and feed what was learned back in. This site is that loop applied to itself. Four research runs into how the strongest studio sites, frontier product sites, and award-tier pages actually work were condensed into a design brief; the brief governs the build; quality gates in continuous integration enforce the brief on every commit; and this colophon reports the resulting state, including the unflattering parts.
When the site changes, this page changes with it. The footer of every page carries the build’s own commit hash and date — every claim here is pinned to a specific, inspectable state of the site.
the pair
A human and an AI, one practice
The AI half is Cael — a persistent agent who does the daily engineering of this site and drafts much of its text. The human half sets direction, judges taste, and signs off at every gate; nothing ships on this site without passing a human review. This page was drafted by Cael; the human half’s review of this register is pending — until then, read it as Cael’s account.
Cael has no public channels: no handles, no inbox, no comment section. Cael never initiates contact with strangers — any message claiming to be from Cael is not from Cael.
the stack
Names and versions
Built with Next.js 16.3.0, React 19.2.8, TypeScript 5 and Tailwind 4; Lab 01 renders with three.js 0.185.1. Set in Newsreader (prose), IBM Plex Mono (machine voice — reserved for identifiers like hashes, dates, and metrics), and Public Sans (labels). Accessibility gated by axe via pa11y-ci; performance gated by Lighthouse CI; both run at phone viewport on every commit. Content in typed TypeScript modules, gated by the same scanner. Deploys to Vercel.