THE LAB

BENCH-0 · the fidelity gate · indistinguishable-to-a-local

The bar: a render a Montauk local cannot tell from a photograph, and nothing ships as product below it. The machinery: 102 numbered verdicts from a human eye, each cross-checked against the 1860s drawings before geometry moves; a 24-agent adversarial audit tracing every builder constant to its registry source; paint calibrated in a closed loop against reference photographs to 1.3%; a structural-similarity instrument that localizes every change. The claim is now under a sealed test rather than an opinion: a two-alternative forced-choice kit frozen on 2026-08-13, 4 scored pairs and 2 catch trials, answers never stored but re-derived from a seed at scoring time so that opening the kit is itself recorded. The drawings keep winning arguments; the walkway pattern the eye flagged turned out to be cast into the 1860 segment plan all along.

BENCH-4 · the road film · client work

A four act film you scroll, shipped 2026-08-20 for a wellness education practice. One scroll scalar owns everything: 133 pre-rendered plates fall toward the city, 41 more stand the camera up out of the fall, and a live three.js corridor carries the last 55% of the page to a horizon. The join between the two plate sequences is a hard cut because it was measured at 1.72 of 255, against ordinary neighbouring steps of 11.12 and 22.07, so a cross fade would have hidden nothing. The pacing was fixed by inverting a flow measurement rather than by feel, and the plate-to-live seam was placed by photographing it in three layers at every step of its window.

BENCH-1 · the lighthouse itself · block by brick

Built the way it was built: 3,874 sandstone blocks in coursed ashlar, 3,700 more bricks through the frieze and watch drum, a plumb frieze standing on eighteen counted brick courses with its panels framed in the bond itself, pierced scroll brackets carrying the walkway, a 48-pane lantern confirmed by the National Archives sheets — and windows placed by an 1853 keeper's survey, alternating with the spiral stair. Rebuilds from a bare clone with one command.

BENCH-2 · AN/FPS-35 radar · two era states

Documents-grade rebuild from declassified 1945 engineering sheets, archival photography, and a 2014 lidar audit. Doubly-curved reflector, waffle-rib tower, era toggle: in-service vs. as it stands today. Mast tip lands within one foot of the lidar return.

BENCH-3 · hero render pipeline · golden hour

The finals chain: path tracing, spectral atmosphere, procedural vegetation, textured ocean. Next rungs on the ladder: cloud systems, breaking surf at the revetment toe, film grade.