Zeist

Creating things that should exist.

4 worksArchive: 8

Amodal

Primitives

Timebase

Outage Observer Archive About Zeist

Amodal

The Arsenal, Venice, Giacomo Franco, 1610

Tool

Amodal

Your coding agents, working together.

Open amodal.co

The problem

Building with coding agents makes you the glue: copying handovers between Claude Code and Codex, reconstructing plans, picking a machine, reconnecting the same tools for each agent.

The approach

One workspace per project that holds the plan, the decisions and the memory. You direct the work in one conversation, on the web or in Telegram; it goes to the right agent on the right machine, and the results and the decisions that need you come back.

What we learned

The hard part is not running agents but continuity. The plan, the decisions and the exact code checkpoint have to travel with the work, or every switch starts from zero.

Primitives

Tool

Primitives

Instruments for the fundamentals of design.

Open primitiv.es

The problem

Everyday design questions, like whether two colours are readable together or what a type scale steps to, are answered by scattered one-off sites. Each has its own layout, its own rounding, and rarely an answer you can send to someone.

The approach

One instrument per question, grouped by primitive, in one harness: the same controls, the same explanation and a stateful address everywhere. The maths sits in one package, JSON in and JSON out, so agents can later ask the same questions people do.

What we learned

The harness is most of the work; once it was right, a new instrument became a folder. Precision is mostly rounding: a colour written to the address has to come back as the same colour, or a contrast check passes on one screen and fails on the next.

Timebase

Royal Observatory, Greenwich, John Varley, about 1830

Tool

Timebase

Visualize and plan across time zones.

Open timebase.me

The problem

Every world clock shows the same row of cities and the same offsets. None of them tells you when the people you work with will be awake, or when the thing on your calendar happens in their day.

The approach

A row per city and colour for the hour: a continuous 24-hour gradient carries the time of day, so icons, terminators and offsets could go. One scrub gesture moves every clock at once. Countdowns to the events on your calendar, tinted by the hour where they happen.

What we learned

Colour can carry what labels usually do; once the rows carried the hour, everything else could be removed. Building the iPhone app and the web app as separate, bespoke things was faster than sharing code, and both are better for it.

Outage Observer

Eddystone Lighthouse, After Henry Roberts, 1761

Tool

Outage Observer

Live status for providers in your stack.

Open outage.observer

The problem

Every provider has a status page; nobody watches 151 of them. An outage reaches you as your own error rate, or as a post on X, before the page admits it.

The approach

One Worker polls the official status pages of 151 infrastructure and AI providers, detects each transition exactly once, and tells you where you already are: a bot in Telegram, Slack or Discord, a push, an RSS feed, the public board, or a Mac menu-bar app.

What we learned

The hard part is not polling; it is not lying. Atomic transition detection, alerts that know which region you are in, and self-hosted brand icons so nothing phones home. Bot Fight Mode blocks your own heartbeat if it hits the custom domain.

About Zeist

Everything here started the same way: wanting something to exist that did not, or not well enough.

Most of it is software we use every day. Games and explainers are next. All of it is made with care and kept in use.

What is no longer on the front is kept in the archive, with what it taught us.

Each work has one print, cut from an old engraving of a real place chosen for it.

The name is a wooded town in the Netherlands, and an echo of zeitgeist.

Zeist

Zeist

Amodal

Amodal

The problem

The approach

What we learned

Next

Primitives

Primitives

The problem

The approach

What we learned

Next

Timebase

Timebase

The problem

The approach

What we learned

Next

Outage Observer

Outage Observer

The problem

The approach

What we learned

Next

About Zeist