The lab.
What the lab does
Idyllic Labs is an applied research lab. Intelligence has become a resource: anyone can buy it by the token, the way they buy computing power or storage. On its own it does nothing, so we build the structures that turn it into causal power for people and organizations — tools to build software without a team, and to start and run things that would otherwise take a company. We use everything we build ourselves first: the lab runs small businesses operated by AI agents on its own tools, and what we learn from running them decides what we build next.
The lab's public work is Busibody, infrastructure for businesses operated by AI agents, and the essays and lab notes at /writing.
Where the lab sits
The lab works in the tradition of Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, and Ink & Switch: institutions where the people who designed a system also operated it, so the research stayed in contact with practice. Idyllic Labs works the same way. We publish an essay after the practice it describes has been used in one of the businesses we run. The idea the lab is organized around, human superagency, is described in its own essay.
How the lab thinks about business descends from Steve Blank, who called a startup a temporary structure that searches for a working business through experiments, and from Paul Graham, who called it a mosquito: small, lean, and built to do one thing. The businesses the lab runs carry that idea further down in scale, with agents doing most of the searching.
How to reach the lab
Mail to the lab goes to william@idylliclabs.com, and a person reads it. Corrections and disagreements are welcome, and the useful ones are cited in the writing.