Stalefish Labs

When the LLM Isn't the Product

One morning in late June, the pipeline that builds the Citizen’s Daily Brief generated an item calling the mayor of New York City “Zoe Mamdani.” A few words later it called him “herself,” with the same easy confidence it brings to everything.

Deliberately Boring by Design

Every app I’ve built at Stalefish Labs has personality, and the underlying purpose of each has usually tilted toward fun. Ridewise transforms weather data into trail conditions to get you outside riding with friends. Muster in many ways acts as a session-based Instagram for helping people get together and share experiences. Even a smaller web experiment like the Jump Simulator, which is fundamentally a physics calculator, has ghost trails and animated motorcycles flying through the air. It’s kind of a modern Fuji Hakayito that hopefully doesn’t lead to epic jump fails in real life. What I’m saying is I like making things that are fun to use.

Thirty-Four Feeds and a Philosophy

The Citizen’s Daily Brief ingests news from thirty-four RSS feeds. That number started at twenty-seven, and grew incrementally during testing. It grew because the original list had a gap that would have undermined credibility: it didn’t include enough sources from across the political spectrum to claim it was seeing the full picture. The CDB isn’t a political product — it’s apolitical by design, and keeping it that way meant expanding the source feeds.

Who Briefs the Public?

I need to start with an honest admission: I thought this project was too ambitious. I assumed I was being naive and borderline arrogant to even consider it. There, I said it.

Every Skateboarder's First Question, Answered With a Sticker

The first thing a skateboarder asks when they roll up to a new ramp is some variation of the same question: “What’s the tranny?”