FeatureBoardby Lewis Valentine
Engineering philosophy

How we build things differently

The example projects aren't just demos — they're evidence of a way of working. When an AI writes and maintains software, the good patterns change. These are the ones that show up again and again across the projects, each grounded in real code.

Not slideware. Every claim below points at something concrete in the repositories.

1,420
Executable test specs
452
Features shipped · FeatureBoard
431
Bugs tracked & fixed
295
Nightly test reports

Across ~20 projects in the wider workspace. FeatureBoard — the platform that builds the rest — is itself the biggest example of every paradigm below.

01

Radical data provenance & verbosity

Every time data crosses a boundary — a file loaded, a surface parsed, a mesh repaired — the code says out loud where it came from, what it tried to do, whether it worked, and if not, why. When an AI is the one debugging, dense, tagged, structured logs are worth more than clever code. You can always turn verbosity down; you can't recover a reason that was never printed.

In the code · cad-solver
[UV-DEBUG] full-circle check: allLoopsClosed=false … using seam-shift logic
[CDT-DEBUG] Face #64: BoundaryEdges=66, HolesCount=0, TotalPoints=82

The tessellator narrates every face: [STEP-EDGE], [REPAIR], [SNAP-WELD], [PLANE-TESS]. A single run emits a full provenance trail of the geometry decisions.

cad-solverstl-wind-tunnelcamera-video-engine
02

Automate the fix — don't ask the user to run it

When something isn't in the right shape, the instinct isn't to print "please run X and come back." It's to do X. If an AI response comes back badly framed, the framing correction lives inside the pipeline and re-runs automatically. If a mesh isn't watertight, it gets repaired before the solver ever sees it. The user is offered the outcome, not homework.

In the code · InfinitusPie · stl-wind-tunnel

InfinitusPie routes review-response generation through OpenClaw and auto-fetches three drafts the moment a review lands — no "click to generate." STL Wind Tunnel runs STLRepair to watertight the mesh automatically as a pipeline stage, not a manual pre-step.

InfinitusPiestl-wind-tunnelcad-solver
03

Data pipelines & edge compute

Heavy work runs as explicit pipelines you can inspect and re-run; light-but-private work runs at the edge, on the user's own device. The split is deliberate: train and process on the workstation, infer where the data already lives.

In the code · gaussian-splats · camera-video-engine · SlopRadar

Gaussian-splat training and the GPU video engine are staged pipelines (COLMAP/nerfstudio, FFmpeg/NVENC, YOLO). SlopRadar does the opposite end of the spectrum: it runs Gemini Nano in the browser — the feed never leaves the device.

gaussian-splatscamera-video-engineSlopRadar
04

Reduce the problem to an AI judgement

A surprising number of "hard" features become easy once you reframe them as: give the model context, ask for a judgement, get structured JSON back. The engineering is in the framing and the schema, not a pile of heuristics.

In the code · MarriageBank · SlopRadar

MarriageBank's "AI Banker" takes a plain-English activity ("back rub") and returns a scored deposit/penalty — a relationship-effort ledger built entirely on model judgement. SlopRadar hands a post to Gemini Nano and gets back a JSON slop/not-slop classification. Same shape, very different domains.

MarriageBankSlopRadarInfinitusPie
05

Validation & testing over code review

When a machine writes the code, "does it look right?" is the wrong question. Every feature and every bug fix ships with an executable check that proves the behaviour — so correctness is demonstrated, not eyeballed. The test suite is the review.

In the code · generated test suites (real counts)

1,420 executable test specs across the projects — one per feature (test_*f-*.js) and per bug (test_*b-*.js), traceable to the item that motivated it. FeatureBoard: 815 · CADSolver: 106 · InfinitusPie: 102 · STLWindTunnel: 94 · Letter Launcher: 83 · PointCloud: 39

FeatureBoard also runs a nightly suite — named checks like "Project Dashboard Load Test" and "API Health" — with 295 nightly test reports on disk. Correctness is demonstrated on a schedule, not eyeballed once.

FeatureBoard · 815CADSolver · 106InfinitusPie · 102STLWindTunnel · 94nightly · 295
06

Planning & metadata as the substrate

Features don't start in an editor — they start as structured metadata. A living featurelist.md, buglist.md, a project MAP.md, and an agent_work_log.md give the AI durable memory: what's built, what's broken, what changed, at what cost. That metadata is what lets features be planned, tracked, and empowered automatically.

In the code · FeatureBoard's own ledger

FeatureBoard tracks 452 shipped features and 431 fixed bugs as structured entries in a 208 KB featurelist.md + buglist.md, backed by a 480 KB agent_work_log.md (1,457 entries) and 1.8 MB of behavioural analytics. Each work-log line carries the task ID, files touched, adds/deletes, and even token cost — e.g. Task: MBF-22 · Files: marriagebank.{html,css,js} · Add: 199 Del: 100. Plans in, provenance out.

452 features431 bug fixes1,457 work-log entriesevery project
07

Write the core — don't just wrap a library

Where most projects would npm install someone else's engine and glue it together, these implement the hard part themselves. Not out of stubbornness — because owning the core means it's understood, debuggable, and bendable to the exact problem. The imports are for the boring parts; the interesting part is hand-written.

In the code · our own engines, not wrappers

Gaussian Splats is our own WebGL splat renderer — the PLY parser, the spherical-harmonic evaluation, and the view-sorted gaussian-quad rasterizer are written from scratch, not gsplat.js or a ported viewer. The CAD Solver hand-writes its whole solid modeling kernel — STEP (ISO 10303) parser, surface tessellator, and B-rep modeling ops up to variable-width edge blends — instead of pulling in opencascade.js. The Wind Tunnel is a from-scratch flow solver, volume mesher, and free-surface water model — not OpenFOAM. The Point Cloud Visualizer runs a custom wavelength-propagation engine. Comet Rex has its own THREE-free world model. And the Rust Installer takes it to the extreme: standard library only, zero crates.

gaussian-splatscad-solverstl-wind-tunnelpoint-cloud-visualizerrust-installer
See these paradigms in the wild → Made with FeatureBoard · featureboard.ai