I'm building Lab.
A free, professional photo editor — open source, local-first, every decision written down in the open.
Lab is a professional-grade photo editor for the desktop, and I'm building it because the tools serious creative work depends on have been fenced off — rented, not owned. Lab is free in both senses: it costs nothing, and it is released under the GPL, so no one can fence it off again. Your photographs live on your machine, the editor works offline indefinitely, and nothing you make ever passes through my hands.
The other half of the work is the record. Every decision of weight in Lab — the architecture, the error model, the names — is reasoned through in the open and written down: the decisions as ADRs, the rules they imply as standards, and the shape of the whole thing right here. It's the kind of engineering knowledge the web is quietly losing — trustworthy because a person stood behind every word of it.
This is Lab as it stands — every box is a decision you can read:
Universal base
The contract
The recipe family · data tier
View tier
The app
The full architecture reference →
All of it answers to the same four pillars, and all of it is early. There's more written down than there is built, and right now I'm the one building it — this site is the work itself, made transparent as it happens. Lab's product home, rsb-lab.com, wakes up when there is something to show.