cybercyber is a product design lab. The site went live this week. As the first client engagements get underway, here's an honest record of how the lab got built and what we're learning before the work starts.
We're publishing this for two reasons. First, the manifesto says we build in public. The manifesto only matters if the practice does. Second, anyone considering hiring us should know how we work — what tools we trust, what we refuse, what the actual operating model looks like when the brand work is over and the production work begins.
This is week one. There will be more.
What this place actually is
cybercyber is not just a studio that takes on client work. It's an operator-led lab that builds its own products, and takes on a small number of client engagements each year that compound with the lab's own work.
This distinction matters. Most agencies sell hours. cybercyber sells judgement that's earned by actually shipping products into the world — real, native apps, with real people using them, not slide decks. The reason we can charge premium for client work is that we're not just consultants advising on AI products. We're the people building them, in our own stack, on our own dime, every week.
The current state of the lab: two products live in Alpha — Granite, a strength coach, and Frame, a BJJ training journal, both native iOS. Others got killed before they got this far. The discipline of refusal we sell to clients is the same discipline we apply to our own work. Most of our own ideas don't survive contact with reality, and we kill them quickly when they don't.
What this means in practice: when a client hires cybercyber, they're hiring a team that has spent the last six months in the trenches building real things, killing the ones that didn't work, and learning what does. The judgement is fresh. The patterns are current. The work is informed by the same discipline we'd apply to our own products and years in the digital product game.
What we build with
The cybercyber tooling stack, current as of week one:
- Claude Code for codebase operations, especially first-pass scaffolding and refactoring
- Cursor for IDE-based work where iteration matters more than scale
- Next.js + TypeScript + Tailwind as the default web stack — boring, reliable, fast to ship
- Anthropic API for AI features in shipped products, primarily Sonnet 4.7
- Vercel for deployment, with Stripe for payments and Clerk for auth where needed
- Hand-written HTML, CSS and JS for the cybercyber site itself — no framework, no build step, nothing between a design decision and what ships.
- Figma for visual exploration that doesn't need to be code yet
- Linear for tracking — including the next post, which is already in the queue
The tooling is mostly conventional. The leverage isn't in the tools. The leverage is in operating the tools at full capacity, which most teams don't because most teams have meetings about how to operate them.
What's next
The first client engagement is underway, with more in the pipeline. Granite and Frame are both live in Alpha, with real people using them, and closer every week to the launch that matters — not a lab-internal one, a real one.
Future blog posts will be working notes from inside that work. It will not be a case study. It will be honest about what worked, what didn't, and what we'd do differently. Case studies are marketing artefacts written six months after the fact. Working notes are written while the work is still wet. The second is more useful. We'll keep doing it.
The lab is soon open. The work is starting.
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cybercyber is a product design lab. We work with a small number of clients each year. The ones who can tell the difference. Email hello@cybercyber.ai.