AL The (Digital) Ad Lab

Projects

What the lab is running

Three running systems and one that gets cut out of plywood. Each began as a question I wanted answered properly rather than argued about, so I built something that answers it.

Poker Tutor

iPhone app · coming to the App Store

A poker coach for people who were never taught. You play real hands against opponents who get harder as you improve, and after a hand that cost you something, it names the decision and what it would have done instead. After a hand you played well it says nothing, because stopping somebody to tell them they did nothing wrong teaches nothing.

The interesting constraint is restraint. It will not name a habit until it has watched enough of the same situation to be sure, and every threshold it uses was set by measuring a scripted flawless player against a scripted flawed one — six of the eighteen turned out capable of accusing somebody who had done nothing wrong, and one cannot be judged honestly at all, so it is not judged.

About Poker Tutor

PLO Tutor

iPhone app · coming to the App Store

The same coach for Pot-Limit Omaha, as a separate app. Four cards, only two of which count, and no bet bigger than the pot. The strategy is written for that game rather than borrowed from hold’em: on every board the app knows what the best possible hand is and how far yours is from it, it counts your outs card by card and says which of them make you the best hand, and the twenty-two habits it watches for are the ones that lose at Omaha — paying off with second-best hands, drawing to second-best hands, playing four cards that do not work together.

Every bar was measured at the app’s own tables against a scripted flawless player and a scripted flawed one. One habit could not be told apart from sound play that way, so the app does not name it.

About PLO Tutor

Refacto

Three daily newsletters · refacto.app · Free

A daily read on ad tech, with separate editions for AI and for AI agents. Each edition works through the day's trade press, earnings and industry podcasts, then argues about what actually matters rather than listing everything that happened.

Where an edition makes a call about where the market is heading, that call is recorded and graded later on a public scoreboard — including the ones that turn out to be wrong.

Refacto Stocks

Research tool · refacto.app/stocks

Public companies put in front of a council of investor lenses — value, growth, technical, macro, AI disruption and others — each arguing its own case on the same company, then reconciled into a single scorecard with the disagreements left visible.

The AI disruption lens exists because most equity frameworks were built before displacement by AI was a live risk to a business model, and it changes the answer on more companies than you would expect.

See the scorecard

Refacto Terminal

Analysis terminal · terminal.refacto.app · Free account required

A working terminal for prediction markets, with Polymarket and Kalshi as venues you switch between. Prices, movement, market depth, fee-aware value numbers and the case for and against a position, assembled in one place rather than reconstructed across a dozen browser tabs each time.

Watchlists and positions are per-person, so it needs a free account before it becomes useful.

Open Refacto Terminal

Library Mode

Product · librarymo.de · free and paid plans

People who build software with AI tools like Claude Code have a problem developers solved decades ago: one bad edit, one lost laptop, and the version that worked yesterday is gone. The developer tooling that prevents this assumes you speak its language.

Library Mode is that protection without the language: every save is a version you can go back to, kept off your machine, with a page you can share when the project is ready to show. It plugs into Claude Code and OpenCode, so "save this project" said to your AI is the entire workflow.

Open Library Mode

CJ

Studio monitors · design frozen at Rev L · not yet built

A four-way active studio monitor system — a fleet of them — designed with an AI from acoustic first principles through CNC-ready fabrication files. Every dimension lives in code, and every joint was verified computationally in assembled coordinates before a sheet of Baltic birch was cut.

It is the AI-trust question in miniature, with a falsifiable ending: either the boxes fit or they don't. The blueprints, fabrication package and assembly guide are all published.

See the design