The Lab Story

AI showed up and everyone celebrated the wrong thing.

"It can write!" they said. "It can generate ideas!" As if the bottleneck in creative work was ever the generation of raw material.

The real bottleneck is cognitive. It's the mental load of holding a complex project in your head while simultaneously trying to develop it. It's the bandwidth consumed by remembering what you've already decided so you can focus on what comes next.

Every AI session started the same way: re-uploading documents, re-explaining characters, rebuilding context from scratch. By the third revision, the AI had forgotten half the story world.

Context rot.

But the real problem wasn't that the AI forgot. It was what that forgetting cost me: creative bandwidth. Every time I had to rebuild context, that was mental energy not available for actual creative work. Repetitive cognitive labor masquerading as progress.

I needed tools that would handle the low-level memory work so my brain could operate at the level where creative breakthroughs actually happen.

So I built ID8Composer. That was the first product. It wasn't the last.

I don't build from whiteboards. I build from the field.

Every tool starts with friction I personally experienced. Not "wouldn't it be nice if"—but "I need this right now or this project fails." Battle-tested in real production environments. Refined through actual creative work, not focus groups.

The question I ask: What cognitive work shouldn't I be doing?

What's repetitive? What's taxing my working memory without generating insight? What could a system handle so I can think about the things that actually require human judgment?

That's the filter. That's what makes an ID8Labs tool worth building.

I see patterns across domains that other people miss. Filmmaking and mycology have more in common than you'd think—both are about understanding how systems grow, how networks form, how small changes cascade. Wildlife biology teaches you to observe without interfering. Trading systems teach you to build guardrails against your own worst instincts.

Cross-domain pattern recognition is itself a form of cognitive leverage. Insights from one field become tools in another.

ID8Labs started as a workshop where I solved problems that other tools ignored. It's grown into something more structured—three lanes, each targeting different kinds of cognitive work to offload.

Products get personality. The lab stays focused on the thesis.

AI as an auxiliary layer of the brain.

Handle the low-level repetitive work so there's bandwidth for high-level creative thinking.

That's the core thesis. Not AI as replacement. Not AI as magic content machine. AI as cognitive extension—an additional layer of processing that handles the work your brain shouldn't waste cycles on.

When you're building a story world, you shouldn't burn mental energy remembering what you decided three weeks ago about a character's backstory. When you're analyzing markets, you shouldn't spend hours on data formatting. When you're managing projects, you shouldn't track decay patterns manually.

The brain has limited bandwidth. Every cycle spent on repetitive cognitive work is a cycle not available for the creative leaps, the strategic insights, the connections that actually matter.

The tools I build are designed around this principle.

Television is changing. The industry I spent twenty years in is transforming in ways that make this the right moment to transition.

But more importantly: tools like Claude Code have arrived. Not just AI that can write—AI that can be directed as a thinking extension. For the first time, someone with deep domain expertise can actually build professional software by focusing on what to build while the AI handles how to build it.

That's the thesis in action. I'm using AI as cognitive leverage to build tools that provide cognitive leverage. It's recursive.

I can take everything I learned in two decades of production—the problems nobody's solving, the workflows nobody's optimizing, the cognitive burdens nobody's offloading—and actually build solutions myself.

That's what this lab is. The convergence of twenty years of knowing what's broken and the tools to finally fix it.

ID8Composer proved the model works. DeepStack proved the lab can serve different domains. Pipeline CLI proved I can build the tools I need to build the tools I ship. The flywheel is spinning.