It’s Matt — here for my first post on Lab Notes.

Together with Daniel, we are building Inanimate — devices and a platform to transform any home or workplace into an agentic environment.

Thanks for signing up for Lab Notes, our record of our work and thoughts as we ship Inanimate.

Here’s what’s been happening since the last note.

On that last point: we’re based near London Bridge and from July we’ll have a couple of desks free most days.

If you’re passing through town or just need a change of scenery, drop us a note and come hang out.

This week we open sourced Resident, our library for running AI-authored code on microcontrollers. It uses a technology called sandboxes.

Resident isn't everything we're doing here at Inanimate. We're focused on how people and agents inhabit spaces together, and we're creating products and a platform for that future.

In the spirit of figuring out this world together, we’re taking this building block that we use in all our prototyping, and we’re sharing it with developers.

So it’s a big milestone for us and I wanted to share the announcement here.

The Resident site has links to the GitHub, examples, docs and so on.

If you’d like the gory technical details, read on…

If AI is to come out into the real world, then it needs to be able to run its own code on the devices around us.

Whether I want Claude Code to grab my desk clock and use its buttons for approve/reject because it needs my attention (which we have built!), or because I want personal software for the school run - musical instrument reminders by the door and laundry nudges at the weekend perhaps - I should be able to ask my agent for that and my agent should do what I mean.

What we’re building towards is interactive apps in our rooms, using the full capabilities of devices essentially vibe coded on the fly.

To do this with zero hassle and safely too, we adopted the idea of a “sandbox” - a place to run mini apps but with only the permissions you grant them - and we brought it to the silicon chips you get in the millions and millions of products already in homes and offices.

That’s what Resident provides for developers: a sandbox for device microcontrollers.

Which is a whole new capability for the users of those devices! The way we have it set up, a test user can create a new mini app from the web or a computer using plain English, and run directly on one of our prototype devices over Wi-Fi.

There’s an in-browser device simulator right on the Resident homepage. Visit the Try it now section, add the Claude Code skills plug-in, and describe your desired mini app… the simulator on the webpage will update live when Claude is done. No hardware required.

We introduced Resident this week as an alpha (v0.5.0) under the highly permissive MIT open source license.

I've also shared some thoughts about technology and philosophy of Resident over on my personal blog.

I will never miss an opportunity to share Star Guitar (Chemical Brothers) by Michel Gondry. If you’ve never watched, grab your headphones because you’re in for a treat.

(10 points to whoever builds the first Star Guitar-inspired generative music visualiser.)

Ok now you’ve watched that, watch how Michel Gondry planned out Star Guitar.

I know this making-of video is 9 minutes long, but seeing drum loops prototyped as oranges is :chefs-kiss:

Till next time,

Matt