independent software studio

Friction Lab

Local-first tools for building, navigating, and understanding software work.

Friction Lab is an independent software studio focused on three products: Relay for autonomous software development, Wayfinder for finding your way around a working environment, and Code Atlas for preserving what a project knows.

The goal is not to replace your editor, terminal, or operating system. The goal is to make the spaces between them feel smoother.

View Wayfinder RC 1 Explore products

Three products

Relay In development build · flagship
Wayfinder CLI RC 1 available navigate
Code Atlas In development understand

Principles

Built with intention.

Every Friction Lab product shares the same engineering philosophy.

Local-first

Data and application state stay on your machine. Every tool is designed to be inspectable and to work without a cloud dependency.

Reusable architecture

Shared engineering patterns and modular design across tools, built for deterministic behavior and long-term maintainability rather than one-off features.

Human-reviewed AI

AI-assisted engineering workflows stay reviewable and auditable by default. Automation extends developer judgment — it doesn't replace it.

Products

Three products, one direction.

Relay builds software. Wayfinder gets you to where the work is. Code Atlas keeps the knowledge behind it.

Build

Relay In development

Local-first autonomous software development platform. Relay turns detailed human-defined product goals into structured, supervised autonomous development. It plans work, coordinates coding agents, governs execution, captures evidence, reviews results, and drives missions toward completion — combining probabilistic AI reasoning with deterministic workflow control.

Friction Lab's flagship product. A native macOS control plane for autonomous software development. Not a chatbot. Not just another coding agent.

SwiftUI macOS local-first agentic Git-aware
Not yet public

Navigate

Wayfinder CLI RC 1 available

Local-first navigation for everything you're working on. Wayfinder helps you find a destination and get there without losing your place. It started as fast filesystem navigation in the terminal, and that Rust CLI is what's available today. Wayfinder is expanding toward a unified local navigation layer across macOS: files, folders, projects, windows, tabs, and working contexts.

Available now: the Wayfinder CLI. In development: Wayfinder for Alfred and unified contextual search.

Rust CLI shell integration local-first
Download CLI RC 1 GitHub

Understand

Code Atlas In development

Local-first developer knowledge, built around your codebase. Code Atlas is a Markdown-native workspace for structured project memory — connecting notes, decisions, source references, and architecture context through project-aware navigation and a reusable reference architecture.

Captures the context behind a codebase and generates AI-ready context packets. In active development.

SwiftUI Markdown-native project memory
Not yet public

Explore the products →