Lab Notes Stamp

We are building WorkSquared, a source-available AI-native workspace to evolve human + computer collaboration. In order to build a truly novel product experience, we are rethinking the technical foundations from the ground up. This Lab Notebook chronicles our explorations.

WS000

Work Squared Forward

Danvers Fleury on April 10, 2025

Brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls aren’t there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to show us how badly we want things.

- Randy Pausch

In the early spring of 2025, my business partner Jess and I found ourselves deeply dug into solving other people’s problems - client problems - after having run into a brick wall trying to get AI agents to independently operate in a marketplace on our behalf.

To be sure, the technology wasn’t quite there….but a lot goes unsaid in such a statement. The devil is in the details. Why? Why, when we integrated agents into our workflow and attempted to give them a guided but independent role were things going so horribly wrong?

We’d bitched about it together. We’d sketched around a little. And then we’d put our heads back down to go solve other problems. This isn’t atypical of how we’ve worked together over the years; it usually comes in fits and starts.

Jess isn’t just a guy that I invent with - he’s one of my dearest friends. We’ve known each other for a long time - long enough to have had a few quarrels, fundamental disagreements, and frustrations with one another. This has helped shape our most excellent agreement for working together, and it’s understood that we may go 6 months without needing to reference it because we’re, for the most part, working on different things.

It is with this backdrop that, separated by workflows and geographies, I received an intellectual and emotional cherry bomb conveniently disguised as a lab note - Jess’ technical whitepaper outline positing the causes and effects of modern LLM’s architecture problem.

Reading it, I felt a surprising emotion: jealousy. This little scribble felt like a window into the near future. It was a technological roadmap that could unlock some of the greatest sociotechnological barriers to human+computer collaboration. It took our learnings, went backwards, wiped the slate clean, and began a new, extremely hopeful chapter.

That was my reading experience. I wouldn’t expect it to be yours. As Jess often says, our lab notes can read like the scribbles of madmen. But to me, this felt like truth. I called him up and told him exactly what was in my heart, “Dude, I’m jealous of you!” And then I felt better. Giddy really. Because Jess had shown me a bright light on a future that I felt desperate to build, right behind the brick wall with an imprint of my forehead on it. This notebook is the story of what happens next.