The labyrinth, and the thread through it.

What the studio has built.

Daedalus is a one-person studio. I build knowledge systems end to end and publish the decision records, tests, costs, and error bars alongside them. This is what is built and what is next.

How the pieces fit

The diagram is the whole studio: Knossos underneath, three ways in on top, Minotaur walking the rooms, Lyre next.

You can see the whole map, wander the rooms, or ask a question. Three doors, one graph underneath.

Ariadnethe mapLive

Network, place and time views of the whole graph, on Tableau Public.

Orpheusthe roomsLive

43,000 rooms, one per artist or style, each linked to its neighbors. Walk in.

Pythiathe oracleLive

Ask in plain language. It answers in prose and shows what evidence answered. Every claim links to a room.

Minotaurthe auditorWorking

An agent. Walks the rooms, invents its own issue list, logs every step, and sends its findings back into the graph.

Knossosthe graphWorking

40,000 artists and 2,900 styles, reconciled from Wikipedia, Wikidata, MusicBrainz, and Spotify into one graph: the archive every door above is built from.

LyrenextNext

Browsing and asking become one surface. Pythia is a component of it; Orpheus’s room views are reused inside it.

One graph at the base, three doors on top of it, an auditor that walks the rooms and reports back, and one dashed outline for what comes next. The red arrow is the point of the whole thing: every answer links to the room it came from.

The bench

Orpheus

Live MAY 2026

An explorable atlas of musical culture: more than 40,000 artists and nearly 2,900 styles, reconciled from Wikipedia, Wikidata, MusicBrainz, and Spotify into 43,000 interlinked “rooms” by Knossos, the studio’s data core. There is no server; the JSON files are the API. You can save rooms and string them into a shareable path (Orpheus calls them relics and golden threads).

Enter Orpheus →

Minotaur

Working PHASE 1 COMPLETE

An AI agent that audits the labyrinth from the inside. It navigates the same rooms a person does, proposes its own issue taxonomy, and logs every reasoning step to a live dashboard. Phase 1: 130 rooms, 306 findings, 12 self-discovered categories, $1.81 total. Phase 2 is on the bench.

Pythia

Live AUG 2026

An oracle over the graph. Ask in plain language; it answers in prose with every claim linked back to the room it came from, and shows what kind of evidence the answer rests on. It ships with a published evaluation rather than a cherry-picked demo: recall@10 0.89 across 115 questions, and the blind spots written down beside it.

Ask the oracle → · How it was measured →

Lyre

Lyre puts browsing and asking on one screen. Pythia sits inside it and it reuses Orpheus’s room views, so it is the same system with a new front door. In design; I will write about it when it ships.

Ariadne

Live TABLEAU PUBLIC

Threads through the maze of musical styles: coordinated network, geographic, and temporal views of the same graph, on Tableau Public. The first thing the studio shipped, and still the best way to see all of it at once.

View on Tableau Public →

How the studio works

Exploration over recommendation

Recommenders say “you might like X.” Orpheus shows what this is connected to, where it came from, and what came out of it.

Static where it can be

Orpheus is 43,000 rooms served as flat files, and no server. Pythia adds a server only where a question needs one, and when the daily LLM budget runs out it falls back to plain retrieval, which costs nothing.

Show the error bars

Style origin years ship with their confidence; when the data’s fuzzy, the product says so.

Nothing is a black box

Every agent decision is logged with its reasoning. I wanted to know what it was thinking.

The making-of

The interface is handmade. The lyres, laurels, and maze tiles in Orpheus are carved linoleum, stamped, scanned at 300 dpi; the landing art is lino printed over a gel-plate monotype. The names come from the Knossos myth: Daedalus built the labyrinth, Ariadne supplied the thread, the Minotaur lives in it; Orpheus walked the underworld and came back; Pythia is the oracle.

Carving gouges, a brayer and ink on a workbench, beside the carved lino blocks for four maze tiles and the lyre.

Three of the five are live.

Walk through them.

Enter Orpheus → or start a conversation