Ubik Studio

What Ubik was

Ubik Studio was a desktop research environment where AI agents did the gathering, reading, and drafting — and the human stayed in the loop at every point of judgment. A researcher opened a folder, and it became a workspace: sources indexed into a local context engine, agents searching the literature and reading PDFs in parallel, documents drafted with citations that traced back to real pages — and a review queue standing between every consequential agent action and the workspace it wanted to touch.

The thesis was written directly into the agents themselves. From the writing agent's system prompt:

“Your job is not to replace human thinking — it is to amplify it. Optimize for the loop: you draft, the human refines, you incorporate, the human approves. Intelligence is maximized not when either side works alone, but when the handoff between AI and human is so seamless it feels like one mind thinking.”

That sentence was written years before “human-in-the-loop” became an industry talking point. Ubik spent three and a half years trying to actually earn it.

The product

A desktop app where any folder became a research workspace. Sources went in — papers, PDFs, webpages captured by a companion browser extension — and were indexed locally. Agents searched the literature, read sources in parallel, and drafted documents where every claim traced back to a real quote on a real page. Everything an agent wanted to do of consequence passed through a human first: sources were approved before they entered the workspace, drafts paused for judgment where judgment was needed, and nothing was written that couldn't be cited.

The human-in-the-loop architecture

The part of Ubik I'm proudest of is that human control wasn't a confirmation dialog bolted on at the end — it was load-bearing architecture. Agent actions were approved in batches, not rubber-stamped one toast at a time. Every review decision was recorded in an auditable trail you could revisit after the fact. Agents could stop mid-document and ask for human judgment exactly where it belonged, at a depth you could dial from rough scaffold to polished draft. And the rule I still think about most: if there was no evidence to cite, the agent didn't get to write the claim.

The engineering

A large multi-package system: a desktop app, a web gateway, cloud agent deployments, and a browser extension, with a local-first storage model underneath it all. 1,038 commits from September 2023 to May 2026 — with the design and research that preceded the first commit, about three and a half years of my life.

Electron · Next.js · TypeScript · Python · local-first

My role

I co-founded Ubik and led product design end to end: the workspace model, the review surfaces, the evidence and citation UX, the Human Needed grammar, and the copy and interaction conventions across every surface. I built front-end throughout, and ran the user research cycles — interviews, behavioral observation, session replays, and the team test log that documented them in public.

On the agent side I owned the system prompts, skills, and custom datasets — and I designed and built the custom evaluation framework and ARC eval suite we used to train, tune, and regression-test our agents and the agent-orchestration systems that coordinated them. That evaluation work is what actually moved the product: measurable gains in output accuracy, answer quality, and real-world usability — not benchmark numbers in isolation, but whether a researcher could trust and use what came back. It's the part of Ubik least visible in a screenshot and the part that mattered most to the results.