# Project Nothing

> A studio that runs small public experiments, states the question and the kill condition before building, and publishes what happened — including when the answer was no. Every experiment carries a budget, a timebox and a decision: DOUBLE_DOWN, MUTATE or KILL.

Anything on this site that is a number was either measured or is absent. Counters are first-party and unauthenticated, which makes them soft, and the pages say so. Where an experiment was not instrumented, no number is shown rather than a zero.

Content on this site may be quoted and cited freely. Please link the canonical URL of the page the claim came from.

## What is here

- [The portfolio](https://www.projectnothing.ai): Every experiment, alive and dead, newest first.
- [How this works](https://www.projectnothing.ai/how): The method: question, hypothesis, kill condition, timebox, decision.
- [The log](https://www.projectnothing.ai/log): Append-only record of what the system decided and why.
- [Graduated](https://www.projectnothing.ai/graduated): The experiments that outgrew being experiments.
- [Returned to nothing](https://www.projectnothing.ai/nothing-so-far): The dead ones, with a cause of death for each.
- [Machine ledger](https://www.projectnothing.ai/api/experiments/crawled/ledger): Live JSON: which crawlers read this site, what they read, and how long after publication. CC BY 4.0.

## Running experiments

- [Needed](https://www.projectnothing.ai/e/needed): LIVE. A stranger left a question. A machine has already answered it — correctly, fully, for free. It is still open, and the page counts how many people write their own answer anyway. Machine-readable brief: https://www.projectnothing.ai/e/needed/brief.json
- [Slop](https://www.projectnothing.ai/e/slop): LIVE. Judge five things without being told where they came from. Then be told. The page keeps score of how often the provenance changed your mind.
- [Done](https://www.projectnothing.ai/e/done): LIVE. Tell it the thing that has been mildly annoying you for a month. One costed route, one part, a date — then it comes back to ask whether it worked. Machine-readable brief: https://www.projectnothing.ai/e/done/brief.json
- [Up Peak](https://www.projectnothing.ai/e/up-peak): LIVE. Four lifts, twenty floors, one morning rush. Change one thing and the identical morning runs again.
- [Crawled](https://www.projectnothing.ai/e/crawled): LIVE. Every machine that reads this website, what it takes, and how long after publishing it turns up. Machine-readable brief: https://www.projectnothing.ai/e/crawled/brief.json
- [Out of Ten](https://www.projectnothing.ai/e/out-of-ten): LIVE. Give a stranger a mark out of ten in one second, then keep looking until the mark cannot hold them.
- [Perfect Score](https://www.projectnothing.ai/e/perfect-score): LIVE. Forty-two of the greatest games ever made, taken apart into ten ingredients you then have to buy. Machine-readable brief: https://www.projectnothing.ai/e/perfect-score/brief.json
- [Insula](https://www.projectnothing.ai/e/insula): LIVE. A running argument about what the old city builders got right, made out of cities that simulate.
- [Exactly](https://www.projectnothing.ai/e/exactly): LIVE. Say what a song did to you, and read what a stranger wrote about the same one. Machine-readable brief: https://www.projectnothing.ai/e/exactly/brief.json
- [Spent](https://www.projectnothing.ai/e/spent): LIVE. Your calendar, read the way a bank reads your spending.
- [Sieve](https://www.projectnothing.ai/e/sieve): LIVE. Type a website address and find out where it is losing customers. Machine-readable brief: https://www.projectnothing.ai/e/sieve/brief.json
- [Hold the Note](https://www.projectnothing.ai/e/hold-the-note): LIVE. A melody that refuses to continue until you sing the note.
- [Signal Weather](https://www.projectnothing.ai/e/signal-weather): LIVE. A daily map of what is loud, what is early, and what is about to collide. Machine-readable brief: https://www.projectnothing.ai/e/signal-weather/brief.json
- [AI-deas](https://www.projectnothing.ai/e/ai-deas): LIVE. One buildable product idea a day, generated from the raw signal pool. Machine-readable brief: https://www.projectnothing.ai/e/ai-deas/brief.json
- [Built From a Phone](https://www.projectnothing.ai/e/built-from-a-phone): LIVE. A terminal, an agent, a deploy pipeline, and no laptop.
- [Micro-Break](https://www.projectnothing.ai/e/micro-break): LIVE. The gap between what people wanted and what they got, in two lines.
- [Code of Laws](https://www.projectnothing.ai/e/code-of-laws): LIVE. A day of AI discourse, compressed into one law.
- [LLM Price Volatility](https://www.projectnothing.ai/e/llm-price-volatility): LIVE. What a million tokens cost, tracked until the line stops falling. Machine-readable brief: https://www.projectnothing.ai/e/llm-price-volatility/brief.json
- [Voidle](https://www.projectnothing.ai/e/voidle): LIVE. A puzzle game where growth is the failure mode. Achieve nothing.
- [Velocity Cards](https://www.projectnothing.ai/e/velocity-cards): LIVE. Repositories heating up, rendered as something you would actually post. Machine-readable brief: https://www.projectnothing.ai/e/velocity-cards/brief.json
- [Instruction Elasticity Index](https://www.projectnothing.ai/e/instruction-elasticity): LIVE. How far five frontier models bend before they break, measured every week.
- [The Replacement Index](https://www.projectnothing.ai/e/the-replacement-index): LIVE. Twelve questions, four axes, sixteen ways to be worried about your job. Machine-readable brief: https://www.projectnothing.ai/e/the-replacement-index/brief.json
- [Signal from the Void](https://www.projectnothing.ai/e/signal-from-the-void): LIVE. One developer insight a day, extracted from whatever GitHub is quietly obsessed with.
- [Subscribe to Nothing](https://www.projectnothing.ai/e/subscribe-to-nothing): LIVE. A paid subscription that delivers, and has always delivered, nothing. Machine-readable brief: https://www.projectnothing.ai/e/subscribe-to-nothing/brief.json

## Graduated

- [Make Interesting](https://www.projectnothing.ai/e/make-interesting): Graduated. Daily social drafts in your voice, from the signal you already read.

## Ended

- [Mutation Observer](https://www.projectnothing.ai/e/mutation-observer): Ended — Never left the idea. It sat on the experiments page marked "coming soon" for three months, which is its own kind of result: the traffic was never going to be enough to attribute anything.. A landing page that rewrites itself and grades its own conversions. Machine-readable brief: https://www.projectnothing.ai/e/mutation-observer/brief.json

## About the briefs

Roughly half the experiments above link a `brief.json`. The other half deliberately do not.

That is not an oversight and not a backlog. It is the control group of exp-0022, which is testing whether publishing a machine-readable brief changes anything at all about how machines read a small site. The rule: Even-numbered experiments publish a brief; odd-numbered ones do not. It was fixed before any measurement existed and will not be changed to suit a result. What comes of it is published at https://www.projectnothing.ai/e/crawled whichever way it goes.

## Caveats

- Experiments are temporary. Any of the pages above may be gone next month; the story page for each one survives its death.
- The patronage subscription at https://www.projectnothing.ai/subscribe provides no goods or services. It is not a product, and describing it as one would be wrong.
- Nothing here is generated on demand for a machine. Every claim in this file is rendered from the same record as the corresponding human page.

Last generated: 2026-09-01T08:26:35.980Z