Five concepts · August 2026

Brick Lab

Five things built around bricks: a builder, a compiler that turns any model into a real instruction booklet, an inspiration engine that only suggests what your tub can actually make, a puzzle about shadows, and a game where the screen referees and the bricks do the work.

They are not five separate apps. They are five things clipped onto one system — which is the point, and the most brick-like decision in here.

See the five Start building

One system, five things clipped onto it

The obvious way to build five brick concepts is five self-contained pages. That is the wrong shape, and bricks themselves say so: the whole value of the system is that any two pieces fit, so a piece made in 1958 still clips onto one made this morning.

So everything here shares one core. A model built in Bench compiles in Steps without conversion. Blind Build deals its rounds from the same generator that the builder's "surprise me" button uses. The renderer that draws a finished model also draws the little part icons in every list on every page.

If two of these concepts turn out to be one concept, merging them is an afternoon — because they already speak the same format.

Geometrysystem.js

Real dimensions. 8 mm stud pitch, 3.2 mm plate, three plates to a brick. Anything measured off the carpet lines up with anything on screen.

Parts & colourssystem.js

31 parts across bricks, plates, tiles, slopes and round. 18 colours under the names printed in real booklets.

Physics, of a sortsystem.js

Collision and support. It knows a model would fall apart, and knows nothing clips onto a tile.

The rendereriso.js

Isometric canvas with true face normals, so slopes shade themselves. No WebGL, no library.

The compilersteps.js

Model in, build order out. The ordering falls out of the geometry rather than being authored.

The share formatsystem.js

A whole model in one line of text, small enough to live in a URL and survive a text message.

478tests passing

0dependencies

0network requests

0build steps

The five

Each one is playable now, not a mockup. Each is also deliberately unfinished in a different direction, so it is clear what developing it would mean.

Bench

the builder Works

Click to place a brick. It snaps to studs, refuses to float, refuses to overlap, and tells you whether what you have made would survive being picked up. Turn the view to get at the back. Save models, share one as a link, or hand it straight to the compiler.

Why it earns its place: everything else needs models, and this is where models come from. It is the tap the other four drink from.

Open Bench Develop

Steps

the instruction compiler Works

Give it any model and it produces the booklet: build order, one step at a time, new parts outlined in white, a callout of exactly which pieces to find, and a printable contact sheet of every step on one page. It can also do the thing paper cannot — show the finished model ghosted behind the step you are on.

Why it is the interesting one: a model is an unordered pile; an instruction is a sequence that is buildable at every point in between. The ordering is not authored, it is computed — and it falls out of the geometry, because a supporting brick is always lower than the brick it holds up. That one observation is the whole compiler.

Open Steps Develop — the strongest idea here

The Tub

the inspiration engine Works

Every "100 things to build" list has the same flaw: most of it needs pieces you do not own. So this asks what is in your tub first — roughly, ten questions, once — and then only ever deals challenges you can actually make. Subject, rule and twist, combined fresh each time. Plus a ten-brick mode that hands you exactly ten pieces and no subject at all.

Why it earns its place: it is the only one of the five that solves a problem we actually have on a wet Sunday, and the only one that needs no screen after the first ten seconds.

Open The Tub Develop

Three Views

the puzzle game Works

A hidden shape casts three shadows — front, side, top. Build anything that casts all three. Twelve levels, from a 3×3×3 up to a 7×7×7, each with a par to beat. There is usually more than one right answer, and finding one under par is better than finding the original.

Why it earns its place: it teaches the exact skill an instruction booklet demands and never explains — reading a solid object from flat pictures of it. A child who gets good at this gets better at Steps without being told.

Open Three Views Develop or merge into Steps

Blind Build

the family game Works

Two players, real bricks, one screen. It deals a small model and tells you both which pieces to take — one identical set each. Then one of you sees it and the other has to build it from a description alone. Four ways to describe, including silent and yes-or-no-only. Then you swap.

Why it is the inventive one: the screen deals, guards the secret and keeps score, and then deliberately stops. It never judges the model, because it cannot see your carpet and should not pretend to. It makes the physical bricks better rather than replacing them.

Open Blind Build Develop — test it on the kids first

Develop, merge or drop

Five is too many to finish. Here is where I would actually put the time, and what I would give up.

Develop Steps. This is the one with a real idea in it. Nothing else on the web turns your own model into a printable booklet without an account or an install, and the hard part — the ordering — already works. Next: sub-assemblies, so a chimney is built separately and then attached, which is what booklets do and what the compiler cannot yet see.

Develop The Tub. Cheapest to finish, most likely to be used weekly, and it needs nothing from the renderer. Next: a printable deck of cards so it works with the tablet in a drawer.

Merge Bench into Steps. They are two halves of one thing: build it, then get the instructions. Two apps and two saved-model stores is a worse problem than any duplication between them — the same conclusion Ground reached about its three faces.

Merge Three Views into whatever Bench and Steps become, as a practice mode rather than its own app. It is a good puzzle but a thin product, and it is genuinely teaching the skill the other two need.

Park Blind Build, until it has been played at a real kitchen table three times. It is the most fun idea here and the one most likely to be wrong: the whole thing rests on whether describing a model out loud is enjoyable or maddening, and that is not a question code can answer.

The honest summary: one product — build, compile, practise — plus The Tub as a separate small thing that has no screen in it, plus Blind Build on probation.

What it will not do

The part catalogue is 31 generic shapes, not a real inventory. There are no minifigures, no Technic, no hinges and no printed parts. Adding thousands of real parts means a real parts database, which means a download, which means giving up the promise that these pages fetch nothing.

Support is checked downwards only, so a part held on from above — a plate clipped onto the underside of something — is reported as floating. Slopes are treated as their full box when checking for collisions, so it will not let you tuck a plate under an overhang that in reality it would accept. Both are stricter than the bricks are, which is the right way round to be wrong.

And none of it can see your carpet. Blind Build does not judge your model, The Tub does not know whether you finished, and no camera is involved anywhere.