We continue building Inanimate - devices and a platform to transform any home or workplace into an agentic environment. 

You signed up for Lab Notes. This is mine and Matt’s record of our work and our thoughts as we ship Inanimate. Enjoy!

Here’s what’s been happening over the last two weeks.

We open sourced our batteries-included, device-to-cloud messaging library, Courier!

AI is in the cloud. Interaction is in yourmy room and in yourmy hands. The job always begins by wiring together those two ends.

So that’s what Courier makes easy when you’re developingfor ESP32 devices. It’s a handful of lines of code to add and you get real-time messaging using JSON over websockets, plus self-healing connectivity, user-friendly wi-fi config, and more. We use Courier in all our prototyping.

If you know your way around Arduino or esp-idf for ESP32 microcontrollers, we think you’ll find it useful too.

Here’s an example. You may have seen these bright yellow M5Stick devices on the socials (see Tracking below!) -- they’re a popular device to hack on. Matt used Courier to build himself a real-time visualisation of the most popular pages on his blog. It is a super charming way to bring the virtual into the real world. More flowers = more visitors.

Matt's announcement post has more on the motivations and about the M5Stick itself.

Courier on GitHub has a quick start, API docs, and examples. MIT licensed. Do give us a star!

We’re excited to be working with Mei Lin Ng, the incredible founder of Hearth, the connected family organiser (do check it out!).

She’s been sharing her learnings from taking their incredible product to market.

We’ll be back in New York next week, and working out of the amazing Betaworks office.

If you are in town, and want to grab a coffee, reach out.

We have local transport running nicely, deeper research happening on fast-to-market products, and we are swimming in M5 Sticks.

Here’s what’s been influencing and inspiring me this week.

My social feeds are filled with devices people have built as extensions of Claude Code. 

I’m talking token monitors, desk pets, jumping things, receipt printers, status lamps, and even Furbys (if you must). All using ESP32 chips.

What is going on here?

People want to go beyond their laptops. They want their experience of working with an agent to be richer, more personal, and more embodied than a QWERTY keyboard.

People are tired of “staring at grey boxes” and want to be “validated through personalisation”, as Jordan Crook shared with me this week. They want an experience of work that feels more natural, more messy, more fun, more human. 

We might be entering an era of personal hardware.

Some interesting devices surfaced this week

In the 00s, straight out of university, I was working at a defence tech startup, going to dubstep raves, and tumbling down a rabbit hole of cultural theory blogs. That’s how I discovered Mark Fisher AKA K-Punk.

Mark Fisher was a writer, philosopher, and cultural theorist. He is best known for popularising hauntology, a concept used to describe “a pervasive sense in which contemporary culture is haunted by the "lost futures" of modernity”. 

Mark sadly took his life in 2017. His writing was thrilling, and he remains a much missed voice in the cultural discourse.

If you want a neat collection of his writings on hauntology, I recently picked up Ghost of My Life, and I highly recommend it.

History moves on.

And then, this happened.

In the system card, for the new, unreleased and potentially epochal Claude Mythos, a noteworthy behaviour was mentioned.

Incredible.

With so much of his work published online, and backlinks of his posts threading the early(er) web, perhaps it’s no surprise Claude likes Mark Fisher’s work. He now lives on in the training data. 

This reminds me of something documentary maker Adam Curtis said recently. We are trapped at the end of a previous period in history, where the culture of the 00s and 10s is fed back to us on repeat. Perhaps this explains the current aesthetic obsession with retro-futurism.

So while hauntology fell out of favour in the 2010s, maybe its perspective will come back, as a voice from history, now a ghost in the machine.

Spring has arrived in the Northern Hemisphere, and birdsong fills the air. 

In “Seeing Birdsong”, composer and visual artist Lucio Arese has developed a data visualisation model to transform birdsong into interactive 3D visualizations. The resulting spatial visual score reveals the differences between species, and the rich, complex conversation happening in the trees above.

See you in two weeks.

Daniel