September 2026 · Lab notes
September 2026: seventeen repos in a week
Our first desktop app, a phone companion, a notebook, an editor and the first website, all started in the last week of September.
Until 22 September the month’s history holds one commit. Then, between 23 and 29 September, we created seventeen repositories and a website.
- 23 SepThe week starts: seventeen repositories and a website by the 29th.
- 24 SepThe desktop app is at version 0.2.0.
- 25 SepThe website is scaffolded. A separate repository for the Mac app.
- 27 SepThe app learns to update itself from a signed release channel.
- 29 SepApp 0.5.6. The site is reworked and released. The Mac repository is retired.
What we started
The center was our first desktop app, built with Tauri, React and Rust. A small supervisor ran beside it on each computer. Its first commit says it was extracted from an earlier project, which our records do not cover.
- A companion app for the phone.
- Dictation with a per-person vocabulary, and a read-aloud voice.
- Meeting recording and write-up, later split into its own portable crate.
- A notebook, a file editor, a drawing canvas and an upload library.
- Tools for agents over MCP, and a router that tried a frontier model first and fell back to a local one.
- The model orchestrator from July, moved in beside the rest on 25 September.
The desktop app took 303 commits on its main branch in those seven days. It went from version 0.2.0 on 24 September to 0.5.6 on 29 September. On 27 September it learned to update itself from a signed release channel.
The first website
We scaffolded the website on 25 September and recorded its first release the next day. On 29 September we reworked it around one line: Lumbridge is an AI factory you own, in four named parts. We released that version the same day and then presented the product as a private beta.
That was the first of several positions the site has taken. It is not the one it takes now.
Two things we undid within days
We made a separate repository for the Mac app. Its first commit is dated 25 September. On 29 September its README was changed to say it was retired, and the Mac app was built from the main desktop repository from then on.
The early desktop app also leaned on an outside code editor and wrote into that editor’s settings. Our installer needed a rollback step to restore them. On 29 September we removed the dependency and made our own editor the default.
What it led to
Most of this code is not in Lumbridge. The last commit on the first desktop app’s main branch is dated 12 October. The history does not record a decision to stop. The commits simply end.
The ideas stayed. Dictation, read-aloud, notes and a phone app are all parts of Lumbridge today, in repositories that started later. The self-updater did not stay. The current App and Core have no updater at all.