experiment 002 · lens.ext · prd
Lens
Every viral statement has a history. Lens is a browser extension that excavates it — reading any claim through four layers: where it came from, who is saying it, who profits, and where it echoes.
$ cat process.log
How this got made — what was specified, what was corrected, and what got rejected along the way.
01 / moodboard
The board wasn't UI inspiration — it was Phad scroll paintings, museum catalog cards, and archival specimen labels. Lens treats statements like excavated artifacts, so the aesthetic contract came from exhibition design, not from other browser extensions: indigo and cream, serifed labels, collection numbers.
02 / specify
claude
The PRD came before any pixel, and its spine is the four-layer read: Origins (where the claim was born), Mind (who is saying it), Incentives (who profits from its spread), Echoes (where it resurfaces). Writing the layers as requirements forced the ordering question — and Phad storytelling answered it: panels, revealed one scene at a time, not a dashboard.
03 / explore
figma make + chatgpt
Figma Make and ChatGPT ran the cheap experiments: artifact-card layouts, label typography, panel-transition variations. Every output got judged against the exhibition contract — anything that read like a fact-checker widget or a generic "AI insights" popup was killed on sight, because Lens's whole premise is that it doesn't judge claims, it excavates them.
04 / correct
the prompting discipline
The recurring correction was containment. Lens has its own visual identity — indigo, cream, archival serif — and every tool kept trying to spread it across the whole interface. The rule that held: the artifact is styled, the shell is not. The exhibition lives inside the frame; the chrome around it stays quiet.
# prompting notes
name the tradition, not the pattern — "phad panels" beat "timeline" every time. containment as a constraint: "the artifact is styled, the shell is not." [add: rough prompt counts per artifact-card iteration.]
05 / reflect
Lens taught the opposite lesson from Hoshi: when the concept is the deliverable, the PRD isn't a spec for code — it is the design artifact. The four layers only got sharp when they had to survive being written as requirements, and the moodboard mattered more here than on any build project, because taste was the only thing separating this from every other "analyze this page" extension.
$ git log --decisions
The two calls that shaped what Lens is — and what it refused to be.
what exists
A complete PRD and the artifact-first concept: four intelligence layers, the Phad-panel reveal flow, and the collectible museum visual identity.
what's specified
In the PRD, not yet built: the extension itself — statement capture, the four-layer analysis pipeline, and the collection shelf where saved artifacts live.
next step
[Placeholder — name the one concrete next step, e.g. prototyping the artifact card in Figma or building the panel-flow demo.]