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Open tools04THE OPEN-SOURCE ARCHIVE

The GitHub Cavern

The work beneath the surface

Come a little closer to the work.

An underground gallery of tools from our own workbench. Drive inside to discover the repositories as illuminated exhibits.

Open source

Explore this place in the world

Welcome to the workbench.

Overview

The work beneath the surface

Quiet Publish makes a small set of tools for thinking, listening and writing. To make them, we need other tools, and some of those turn out to be worth sharing. The cavern is where they live.

Two chambers hold open-source work you can install and use today. A third holds a workshop piece: an experiment in active development, shown for what it is teaching us and not offered as a product.

Why it is underground

Tools like these are rarely the headline. They are the reason the headline holds up. A control surface that shows what agents are doing, a kit that keeps a design system honest, a harness that asks whether work is really done: none of them is glamorous, and all of them change how carefully we can build.

How we label things

Every piece in the cavern carries a plain label. “Open source” means the code is public and you can use it. “Workshop” means an experiment, shown for its ideas, with its limits stated.

PRINCIPLES AT WORK

The problem

The products are the part of the studio people see. Underneath them is the workbench: the tools we make so we can build the products well, and the experiments that tell us what to try next.

OUR APPROACH

Put the useful tools in the open, say plainly which things are finished, which are early and which are experiments, and keep them small enough to understand in an afternoon.

What it does

  • Mardi Gras: a terminal control surface for issues and coding agents. Open source under the MIT license, with public releases.
  • Next.js → Claude Design: a guide and a command-line kit for carrying an application’s design system into Claude Design. Open source.
  • darker: a harness for checking AI coding work honestly. A workshop experiment in active development, shown here for what it is teaching us; its repositories are not public yet.

How it’s built

  • Go and the terminal (Mardi Gras)
  • Node.js and esbuild (Next.js → Claude Design)
  • Bash, Python and Go around Claude Code (darker)

DECISIONS, AND WHY

  1. Open by default, honest about maturity

    A tool that helps us will often help someone else, so the finished ones are public. Each one says what state it is in, including “early”.

  2. Tools that keep a person in the loop

    Each piece here makes work that happens out of sight visible again: agents in progress, a design system drifting from its app, a claim of “done” that hasn’t been checked.

Timeline

  1. Mardi Gras is released.

  2. The darker experiment begins.

  3. Next.js → Claude Design is published.

  4. darker takes on multi-sprint campaigns, and development continues.

Status

Open sourceOpen tools. The workbench beneath the products, in the open.

Two open-source repositories under the Quiet Publish organization on GitHub, Mardi Gras under the MIT license, and one workshop experiment in active development whose repositories are coming to GitHub.

Writing

Credits

  • Designed and built by one of the studio’s founders, with contributions from the open-source community.