A small lab, working in public.

IQ Labs builds software for fields where the details matter. Identifying an aircraft from its silhouette. Knowing which cinema is actually showing the film at the aspect ratio it was shot in. Reading on-chain data without being sold something.

How the work happens

The pattern is the same each time. Find a subject where people are doing careful work with tools that haven’t kept up. Learn it far enough to understand what practitioners actually disagree about — not a weekend’s reading. Then build the thing that should already exist, put it on its own domain, and let it be judged on whether it’s useful.

Most of these are small. Some are useful to a few hundred people and never will be useful to more, and that seems like the right outcome — a narrow tool that gets the details right is worth more to the people who need it than a broad one that doesn’t.

On the numbers

Where a tool publishes a figure, the working is published with it. FightIQ shows every pick including the losing ones; ConflictIQ cites a source for each data point. A number nobody can check isn’t worth putting on a screen.

Getting in touch

Corrections to any of the tools are welcome and usually acted on. So is a conversation about building something in a field with the same shape.

IQ Labs is run by Gordon Shepherd, in the United Kingdom.