by Marco

All Lab Notes

The complete archive from where product design, engineering, and AI meet: decisions, systems, prototypes, and the work of shipping.

Back to Latest Lab Notes

2026

May 19

Seven Radical Directions: When You Refuse the First Answer, AI Starts Designing

People love saying AI produces bland, same-ey design. They are right about the first answer. They are wrong about everything after it.

AI Design7 min read

May 11

Why Your X Reach Changes: A Plain-English Guide To The For You Feed

X published code for a recommendation system shaped like the one behind the For You feed. Here is what it seems to reward, what it removes, and why legitimate creators can suddenly lose reach, without a single line of code.

Social Media9 min read

Apr 07

My Rebirth as a Developer

I didn't step away from development because I couldn't do it. I stepped away because the modern frontend ecosystem buried the craft under layers of complexity that never justified itself. AI gave me a way back in.

AI Design8 min read

Mar 29

I Made Pretext Accessible. Here's Why That Matters More Than You Think.

A tiny JavaScript library that measures and lays out text without touching the DOM had stunning demos, but they were invisible to screen readers and search engines. I fixed that with dual-layer rendering and progressive enhancement.

Creative Technology10 min read

Mar 19

I Built a Full Teletext Suite in Two Evenings and It Felt Like the Future

From a tweet about reviving Teletext to a full suite for parsing, displaying, editing, generating, and terminal-rendering an obscure binary media format. In two evenings. That is the shift.

Creative Technology9 min read

Mar 11

How to Make Retro Games That Actually Look Authentic

Retro visuals were not just an aesthetic choice. They were the natural result of very specific technical limitations. If you want your work to feel convincing, you need to build with those constraints in mind from the start.

Game Development10 min read

Mar 10

AI Is Not a Slop Machine. People Are Using It Like One.

AI is a force multiplier. And force multipliers do not care whether they are multiplying rigor or recklessness.

AI Design9 min read

Mar 05

Why Some of the Most Innovative People End Up on Performance Plans

Large organizations say they want innovation. Their systems often reward the opposite.

Product6 min read

Feb 19

A Decade of Business Logic Lived in One Person's Head. I Had to Turn It Into a System.

How I used AI to untangle years of undocumented business logic buried in spreadsheets and one person's expertise, and turned it into a scalable CMS design.

UX Design8 min read

Jan 31

How I Finally Shipped a Commercial Grade Arcade Game

From a Saturday afternoon prototype to a shipped iOS, Android, and macOS game. How AI helped bridge the gap between wanting to make games and actually shipping one.

AI Design10 min read

2025

Jul 24

I Built a Structured Prompt Composer for AI Video—And I'm Giving It Away for Free

A new tool to help you write better prompts for Veo, Runway, Pika and other AI video generators. It supports JSON, YAML, XML, and Markdown, and it's open source.

AI Design7 min read

Jun 26