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.
The lab
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 it turns into something that runs.
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 real 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.
A grade on every claim. Every research claim carries its grade — and in this lab verified is a reserved word, earned only by a kernel exit code. What travels with the claim: 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.