Notes from the workshop: what we keep on the bench.

There is always a bench. The bench is where ideas live before they become projects, and where projects live in between the bursts that turn them into products. We keep ours visible on purpose — it makes it easier to pick the next thing to ship.

Here are a few that are sitting on it right now.

A tiny CLI for briefing Randal

Right now we hand Randal a paragraph and a URL. That works, but the paragraphs keep growing footnotes. We're prototyping a small CLI that turns a brief.md plus a done.yml (the "definition of done") into the prompt Randal actually runs against.

$ hassion brief ./eaglet/brief.md --send
→ parsing brief                                 [ok]
→ resolving links + attachments                 [ok]
→ packaging context (12.4kb)                    [ok]
→ dispatching to randal                         [ok]
  run id: r_01h8x1pq · estimated 4h 30m

It's two-thirds of a thing. The piece we don't have yet is the right shape for the done.yml — a hard spec turns into a checklist, and we don't want a checklist; we want a set of contracts that Randal can verify on its own.

A "what's good about this video" daily

Internal-only. Eaglet runs overnight against a small list of channels we care about and posts a one-page brief into our Slack the next morning. It's been quietly the most useful thing we've built this quarter, even though it's also the least polished.

The best internal tools are the ones nobody would let us ship as a product.

A markdown-first journal pipeline

Which is to say: this very page. We started with one journal entry in HTML and immediately knew that wasn't going to scale. So we rewrote it as a small markdown loader that pulls posts from content/journal/, renders them server-side, and lets us drop in code, callouts, and video embeds without any extra ceremony.

A "what's next" page that updates itself

Half-built. We want a page like this one — a list of things on the bench — that we don't have to remember to update. The current sketch reads from a bench.md file Randal keeps in good shape automatically.

None of these are products yet, and not all of them will be. But that's the point of a bench: not everything has to ship for the workshop to be working.