Ben Schippers

I build real things with AI, and show you how each one was made so you can build your own. Cloud engineering at Microsoft by day.

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connecting to the tank… compute temperature
Newest result

From the windowsill lab · preprint draft

A blind planet search that is built to say no

My home machine searched 12,898 TESS light curves for transiting planets without being told where to look. It found nine known planets on its own, raised zero false alarms on 1,850 scrambled decoys, and killed five of its own seven leads. One is still standing: TIC 374861595, a ten-percent dip every 1.94 days that NASA’s pipeline has seen 259 times and never promoted. No planet is claimed.

  • 116 detections
  • 9 known planets recovered
  • 0 placebo hits
  • 5 self-refuted leads
Read the draft paper Everything we know about TIC 374861595

Also from the lab: the same search as a kit you can run yourself, and OEIS A329398, a 2019 counting conjecture the lab proved, now part of the approved entry.

Work

Two you can use today, one in open beta, and two taking names before launch.

Scout, Skates and Macey — three raccoons — standing beside their wagon on a gravel shore at dawn, mist on the lake and mountains behind

the long way

Three raccoon narrators tell you about every place you drive past.

waitlist

Join the waitlist
The VibeCrafting workshop: “Describe it. Get the cut list.” beside a drafted front elevation of a garage bookshelf

VibeCrafting

Describe something to build and get back cut lists, shopping lists, exploded views, and printable connectors.

beta

Open VibeCrafting
Visual Inventory’s home page: a photographed pantry shelf beside the printed receipt of items it read out of it

Visual Inventory

Photograph a shelf and get back the items, dates, and household context inside it.

live

Open Visual Inventory
Exp-lore’s home page: “Your campaign, canonized.” beside a typeset survivor journal generated from a real session

Exp-lore

Turns your gameplay screenshots into survivor journals and war dispatches grounded in the run.

waitlist

Join the waitlist
The Career Compass dashboard: job applications sorted into Discovered, Applied, Screening, Interviewing and Offer columns, beside a list of next actions

Career Compass

An MCP server that makes Claude your job-search partner: applications, tailored documents, interview prep.

live

Open Career Compass

All work, with past products

Labs

Three you can run in a browser tab, right now.

one ring a year · the narrow ones were the dry years

Heartwood

Grow a tree's rings from a climate, then crossdate a core against a real bristlecone chronology.

Grow a tree
two home machines take the turns

the windowsill

A home GPU works through small physics questions overnight, and every finished run grows a leaf on the stem.

Open the windowsill
one fish per commit

the aquarium

Ben's machine as a live fish tank: CPU heat is the weather, commits and ships are the fish.

Enter the aquarium

See every experiment

Writing

The three newest entries from the journal.

Lab Notes

None of It Was New

Ten days aimed at the observer effect, sixteen findings, and a scoreboard that reads zero new. Every candidate that looked new was already in a paper, and we checked by reading them.

Read it
Field Note

Digits Know Who Wrote Them

Seventeen domain-blind detectors, pointed at earthquakes, balance sheets, twenty thousand stars and two planet catalogues. One of them can tell whether a human typed the numbers.

Read it
Field Note

Same Hand

Five strangers built quietfail. None of them met. 200 cold AI sessions across eight model versions showed why: the model draws coined names from a short menu.

Read it

All writing

About

Eleven years in the Microsoft ecosystem, ten months out of work where shipping in public became the job, and back at Microsoft since March 2026 on the cloud-engineering side of its enterprise AI work. Before any of that I measured tree rings at the University of Arizona. A branch breaks, the rings underneath finally show, and that is where the name comes from. The About page has four worked cases, each with its dates and numbers.

Read the whole story

Contact

Microsoft has my weekdays. Write if you are building something strange and want a second pair of eyes, or if you push frontier models hard enough to find their edges.

✉ Benjamin.Schippers@outlook.com 👥 linkedin.com/in/Benjamin-Schippers 💻 github.com/benskamps

This year’s ring isn’t closed yet.

🌲