The lab begins

By March 2026 the organisation had its own Anthropic licensing. My personal subscription no longer had to carry work. It could carry curiosity.

The February repos had given agents knowledge. The lab’s first five months went to giving them an organisation: Dream Team, a company of agent pods over Mattermost and a message bus, rebuilt as a Temporal platform and then measured out of existence on 2026-07-06. That arc has its own page.

The platform wanted a local coder, which became SnapDragon-Coder. Its answer led to a second question, and the second to a third, and the third is Marilyn: a language model trained from random weights on hardware in my house, to study why a model that has memorised something still fails to use it.

Along the way the lab acquired a few machines, the machines acquired backups after losing a home directory, and the whole thing acquired the operating discipline of the day job: workflows that survive a session, gates on invariants, and evidence before belief.

What changed: the AI stopped being a tool for the job and became the subject of the work.