October 2026 · Lab notes
October 2026: four websites, three shipped
Mostly the website: versions two to five in five days. Also our first software factory and our first fork of Herdr.
Mostly the website. Four versions in five days, and one of them never shipped on its own. Near the end of the month we also did the thing that mattered more: we forked Herdr.
- 12 OctA kit for our first software factory. The last commit on the first desktop app.
- 16 OctA private fork of Herdr’s terminal manager, and a notes editor that runs in a terminal.
- 31 OctA repository of mods for the desktop app.
Versions two to five
The website repository took 265 commits in October across all its branches. Each version came with a new idea of what the company sells.
- Version 2, released 13 October. A quiet infrastructure and venture firm for owner-run businesses, with three offers: capital, compute and engineering.
- Version 3, released 14 October. The same story with full-width images and ambient video.
- Version 4, built 17 October. Forward-deployed engineering for small businesses in Southern California. It was never shipped on its own.
- Version 5, planned, built and shipped on 17 October. A spec-sheet look, built in parallel lanes, carrying version 4’s content with it.
None of those positions is the one the site takes now. We describe them here because they are what we tried.
The first factory
On 12 October we created a kit for our first software factory: a separate user, network rules, and a registry of factories. The commits for website versions 2, 3 and 4 were mostly authored by that factory’s agents. The release checklist kept one rule in bold: shipping to production is the founder’s call.
The mistake: it worked in dev
The version 5 plan opens with a list of facts every builder must know. The first two are mistakes we had already made.
The pages were rendered to HTML at build time and never hydrated in the browser. So any click handler written the usual React way worked on a developer’s machine and was dead in production. And a stylesheet imported from a page component did not reach the production bundle at all.
A fork, and what it led to
The last commit on our first desktop app’s main branch is dated 12 October. Four days later, on 16 October, we created a private fork of Herdr’s terminal manager and made our first commits on it: rows for machines, a command palette, a detail drawer and launcher buttons. That fork is Lumbridge TUI today.
The same day we wrote a markdown notes editor that runs in a terminal, with live preview. It began inside the fork and was renamed once that week. It is Lumbridge Notes now, in its own repository.
On 31 October we started a repository of mods for Herdr’s desktop app, which we had not forked yet. The first wave added launchers, a palette and a notebook tab, built by agents working in parallel. That repository became Lumbridge Mods. The fork of the app itself came nine days later.