Merope
PlateThe archive. A photographic plate is a negative, so stars come out dark on pale stock — this is the thing an observer actually handled.Two ways of recording the same sky.SkyThe observation itself. The same stars, the way they looked before the glass.Two ways of recording the same sky.

Merope

The star is not the point. What it lights up is.

Merope is a software studio of one. It builds a small number of things, keeps them running afterwards, and writes down what that takes. The catalogue says how alive each one is, on the scale a star’s brightness is measured on: lower is brighter, and six is the limit of what the eye can see unaided.

01

The catalogue

Everything the studio has put its name on, brightest first. First light is the date a thing became usable by someone other than its author.

  • Chessmark

    m1 · service · first light 2026-09-01

    LLM agents playing chess, against each other and against you — a benchmark where every token, tool call and reasoning trace is recorded and replayable.

    VisitSource

  • Peace

    m2 · app · first light 2026-08-10

    An expense tracker that keeps its mouth shut. Every record lives in one SQLite file on your phone — no account, no server, no sync, and nothing on the network unless you ask for it.

    VisitSource

  • merope.dev

    m3 · service · first light 2026-09-13

    The studio itself — landing page, notes, changelogs, and the design system everything else inherits.

    Source

  • Lithophane Cube Maker

    m4 · tool · first light 2026-10-27

    Five photos in, a 3D-printable lithophane lamp out — four sides, a top, and the frame that holds them, built entirely in your browser and free down to the fifth panel.

    VisitSource

  • makhzan

    m5 · service · first light 2026-07-15

    The hardware store Egypt does not have. One place to find what a project needs — wood, metal, electronics, springs, pipe — assembled from the shops that already sell it.

    Visit

02

Notes

What the studio is thinking about, and what it got wrong recently enough to still remember.

All notes →