Most good thinking happens before anything is officially a thing. You write a note, share it once, lose it. Or you message a friend, the thread scrolls past, the idea evaporates. This is where the in-between stuff lives so it doesn't have to become work to be worth keeping.
Three things, wired together. A repo to hold artifacts. A forum to talk about them. A portal so nobody gets lost looking for either.
Each shelf is its own GitHub repo inside the hiebel-lab org. They publish to subdomains on hiebel.ai so the whole thing reads as one place from the outside.
Different stuff wants different homes. Markdown belongs in a wiki where you can edit it from a browser. Code belongs in git. Decks and PDFs need a viewer. Trying to cram all three into one tool is what kills these things.
Two channels because they do different jobs. One for ideas that need to marinate, one for the room when something's actually happening.
Zulip is the archive: topic-per-idea, infinite history on the free tier, searchable forever. Signal is the pulse: encrypted, phone-native, ephemeral by feel. If a Signal message contains an idea worth keeping, someone copies it into a Zulip topic. That's the only handoff rule.
This shelf is personal-account only. Everything lives on hiebel.ai infrastructure that I run on my own time. Nothing here touches any employer, client, or customer. That's not a soft preference — it's the line that lets this place exist at all.
Total setup is under ten minutes once the invite lands. Nothing to install on your machine. Everything is web-first; the CLI bits are optional.
The point isn't a tool. The point is a small group of people who like each other's thinking, sharing the ten percent of their work that isn't yet anyone's job. The infrastructure exists so the sharing has a place to land that won't disappear.
If a year from now we look back and the proposals folder has thirty entries — half of them never built, ten of them prototyped, three of them shipped somewhere — that's the win.
One open question for later: there's a fast GPU sitting in my basement doing other things. If at some point we want a private model the group can talk to — for half-baked drafts you'd never paste into a public chatbot — we have the option. Not a commitment, just a door we keep open.