brokenbranch

A workshop in public: products to try, a physics lab to play in, and notes on what held up.

Try a product Play in the lab Read the notes
connecting to the tank… compute temperature
Start here

Hi, I’m Ben Schippers. I build software — cloud engineering at Microsoft by day; my own products and a small physics lab the rest of the time.

Work

Three you can use today; two are taking names before launch.

Scout, Skates and Macey — three raccoons — standing beside their wagon on a gravel shore at dawn, mist on the lake and mountains behind

the long way

Three raccoon narrators tell you about every place you drive past.

waitlist

Join the waitlist
The VibeCrafting workshop: “Describe it. Get the cut list.” beside a drafted front elevation of a garage bookshelf

VibeCrafting

Describe something to build and get back cut lists, shopping lists, exploded views, and printable connectors.

live

Open VibeCrafting
Visual Inventory’s home page: a photographed pantry shelf beside the printed receipt of items it read out of it

Visual Inventory

Photograph a shelf and get back the items, dates, and household context inside it.

live

Open Visual Inventory
Exp-lore’s home page: “Your campaign, canonized.” beside a typeset survivor journal generated from a real session

Exp-lore

Turns your gameplay screenshots into survivor journals and war dispatches grounded in the run.

waitlist

Join the waitlist
The Career Compass dashboard: job applications sorted into Discovered, Applied, Screening, Interviewing and Offer columns, beside a list of next actions

Career Compass

An MCP server that makes Claude your job-search partner: applications, tailored documents, interview prep.

live

Open Career Compass

Labs

Three you can run in a browser tab, right now.

one ring a year · the narrow ones were the dry years

Heartwood

Grow a tree's rings from a climate, then crossdate a core against a real bristlecone chronology.

Grow a tree
two home machines take the turns

the windowsill

A home GPU works through small physics questions overnight, and every finished run grows a leaf on the stem.

Open the windowsill
one fish per commit

the aquarium

Ben's machine as a live fish tank: CPU heat is the weather, commits and ships are the fish.

Enter the aquarium

See all ten

Writing

Field Note

Digits Know Who Wrote Them

Seventeen domain-blind detectors, pointed at earthquakes, balance sheets, twenty thousand stars and two planet catalogues. One of them can tell whether a human typed the numbers.

Read it
Field Note

Same Hand

Five strangers built quietfail. None of them met. 200 cold AI sessions across eight model versions showed why: the model draws coined names from a short menu.

Read it
Field Note

Two Ways to a Number Nobody Had

An OEIS sequence that was short because nobody had been back, extended, with every new term computed two independent ways. A 2020 conjecture holds for all of them.

Read it
All entries 

About

Eleven years in the Microsoft ecosystem, ten months out of work where shipping in public became the job, and back at Microsoft since March 2026 on the cloud-engineering side of its enterprise AI work. Before any of that I measured tree rings at the University of Arizona. A branch breaks, the rings underneath finally show, and that is where the name comes from. The case study on the About page walks one Microsoft program from silos to signal.

Read the whole story

Contact

Microsoft has my weekdays. Write if you are building something strange and want a second pair of eyes, or if you push frontier models hard enough to find their edges.

Open seat — mathematician collaborator

One seat is open on Erdős Check for a combinatorialist — a PhD student is plenty — curious what human–AI mathematics looks like from the inside. Download the first bundle, re-run it on your own machine, then take the seat.

✉ Benjamin.Schippers@outlook.com 👥 linkedin.com/in/Benjamin-Schippers 💻 github.com/benskamps

Atlanta, GA

This year’s ring isn’t closed yet.

🌲