The studio is open. Here is how a photograph gets in.
I built brownlittlefish from scratch, with an AI agent writing most of the code. This is the human in the loop part: what I handed off, and what I still do myself.
For the last few months, I've been setting up my online photography and design studio, with the goal of running it absolutely solo and at a near-zero cost of operation. It is open now. brownlittlefish is taking bookings for family sessions, team headshots and events across the Tri-Valley, the South Bay and the wider Bay Area.
I built the site myself, from scratch, without a template: the gallery, the bookings, the writing. I have spent the last two years experimenting with a lot of products and ideas, and built things to really solve my own problems. The studio is where all of that came together, in something I really love.
An AI agent wrote most of the code. I know by now what to hand over and what to keep: it writes, I decide what the site should be and what goes live.
How a photograph gets in
One piece of it: a photograph goes from my camera to the shop in one command.
I sort each file by what it shows:
- ·people
- ·the city
- ·the land
- ·what an older world left standing
A frame a client can book goes one folder deeper:
- ·family
- ·headshots
- ·event
Then one command does the rest. The file gets its id from its own contents, so it can never be added twice:
function hashId(buffer) {
return "br-" + createHash("sha256").update(buffer).digest("hex").slice(0, 6)
}
The location is stripped before anything is saved, so no GPS ever reaches the site. The original goes to a folder that never leaves my machine. An AI drafts a caption and a description from a guideline, automatically, and waits for my approval.
Both stay a suggestion: the caption a reader sees, the description a screen reader hears. I write the words myself. Until I do, the site refuses to build at all.
That is the shape of the whole studio: the machine does what is mechanical, the agent drafts, and I write the words and make the call.
The lab behind it
The studio is also an experiment. At household.dev, my lab, I build tools for working with AI and agents, and the studio is where I test them on a real business. Running this business feeds all of my interests, and those feed the research.
If you are in the Bay Area and need family photos, team headshots, or someone at your event this fall, the studio is open.