The lab is named for a broken branch — the one you can finally read, because the break exposes the rings. That is not decoration. The first science I ever did was dendrochronology: reading a tree's whole life out of a cross-section, ring by ring, the drought years narrow and the good years wide, all of it legible in the grain. This whole place is that habit, pointed at new material. A git repository read as tree rings. A core crossdated against a master chronology. A ten-month job search counted out loud, drought years included. One metaphor, carried the whole way down.
What this is
Broken Branch is a one-human, agent-augmented systems lab. Microsoft is the day job. This is the parallel track. This is where the curiosity goes — and where the proof gets made.
The spread across this lab — physics sims, MCP servers, mobile apps, enterprise Copilot, research tooling — comes from pointing the same setup at whatever's interesting that week.
The operator
There's no manufactured mission here. The honest one is a verb, not a noun: explore, create, make art, move the needle — and find the meaning where I go.
The method
The lab is a machine for turning curiosity into shipped, surviving artifacts at a sustainable rate. Its organs:
One operator and a fleet of agents. Claude, mostly, plus a few others. Directed, not hand-typed. I point them at the work and go to bed; in the morning there's a merge queue and a report.
A cadence one body can hold. Day job, evening peak, an overnight agent batch, a morning review.
Brakes. Permission gates, a secrets denylist, a security-dashboard hook — circuit breakers on the carnival ride, so an unattended agent can't do something irreversible.
Receipts. Every research claim carries its evidence grade — and in this lab verified is a reserved word, earned only by a kernel exit code. Receipts over vibes: the live link, the source link, the test that caught the bug, the run — and what failed. When a research run reports its headline thesis as null, the null is what gets published.
Tests as the trust boundary. Green and smoke-tested before it goes out. Verification catches what confidence misses.
The membrane
Some things are public on purpose: the shipped artifacts, the method, the writing, and the rings — including the drought years, counted out loud, so the next person can. Some things stay private on purpose: the operator's real location and keys, client-sensitive work, the raw internals of the fleet. The lab shares its method and its results — never its keys.
The soul
The writing is a cross-section. The first science was reading rings. The newest tool reads a git repo as rings. One image, carried all the way down: a person who reads his own work the way a dendrochronologist reads a tree — ring by ring, drought years and growth spurts legible in the grain.