Nymfarious — a luminous deep-sea bloom

Independent · AI-native · Honest

Nymfarious

Software you can trust.

A small studio making honest software for the projects that actually matter to you — your family history, your travels, your memories. AI does the surfacing. You keep the judgment, and the data.

The Workshop

What we're building

Some are live. Some are still in development.

RootsDjinn pear mark
Live · Beta

RootsDjinn

Genealogy research that surfaces the clusters, name variants, and quiet conflicting dates you would otherwise miss — and exports your whole tree at any time, one click, no support ticket.

Open app →
TeaMark gold cameo mark
Beta

TeaMark

Scan a china or glass backstamp to uncover its maker, era, pattern, and story. A thoughtful field companion for thrift-shop hunters and collectors, built for the moment the cup is in your hand.

Visit TeaMark →
Proposal · Coming soon

Dilene's Realtor Group

A proposed commercial app for Dilene's real estate group. Shaped around her team's real work, with scope and details to come.

Coming soon
Juniper leaf mark
Live · Private Beta

Juniper

An assistive voice board for typed and prepared speech during phone calls. Device speech is open to everyone; cost-controlled cloud voices are currently limited to approved testers.

Launch Juni →
Magpie favicon
Beta · Windows · 0.8.2

Magpie

Gather everything shiny into one nest. Magpie sweeps your drives, phone dumps, and photo piles into one catalog — spots the duplicates, remembers where every file came from, and proposes a cleaning plan you approve in small, human-sized chunks. Local-first: nothing moves, uploads, or is deleted without you.

Live · In development

Topology Explorer

Eleven interactive demos — Möbius strips, Klein bottles, dimensional slicing, prime constellations, π, φ, and Euler’s prime product — you can drag, zoom, and reshape. Pure 2D canvas, zero WebGL, from hexagons to the 4th dimension.

Open Explorer →
Live · In dev · Alpha

RootsDjinn Field Guide

The pocket companion to RootsDjinn — carry a branch, fan out your ancestors like a folding scissor-chart, capture finds in the field, and set out on gamified Expeditions, with every discovery returning safely to the desktop tree.

Best on mobile — the desktop layout may look skewed.

Launch Field Guide →
Coming soon

Parallax Debater

Two AI voices take opposite sides of a question and argue it out, so you can weigh the strongest case for each before you decide — structured disagreement as a thinking tool. (Placeholder pitch — confirm the real one.)

Coming soon
Coming soon

TripSafe

Travel safety maps with risk-zone overlays and a "download this region" mode that works when you are off-grid. Built on open map data, sharp where it counts.

Coming soon
In development

Atlas Lab

Deep-zoom historical maps where borders move and place names change with the years — so a town that no longer exists is still findable, and an ancestor's journey can be drawn across the right century.

In the workshop
On Hold

Little Sister

A gentle companion for friends and family walking alongside someone living with dementia, Alzheimer's, or other forms of cognitive change. Voice, photographs, and the family tree woven together — so the people who love them can stay connected, even on the hard days.

On Hold
Coming soon

Frame Fuser

A media pipeline you can walk end to end: generate an image, edit it, sharpen it, set it moving, give it a voice, then lay the pieces on a timeline and export. Swap the AI behind any step without rebuilding the rest — and run the whole thing with no keys at all to see the shape of it first.

Coming soon

Why we build this way

Honesty is not a feature. It is the point.

Most software makes promises that hide what is really happening. We do the opposite.

Data is always yours alone

Data is always yours alone

Portable exports on a schedule, one click, no support ticket. If we ever close, your work is already in your hands.

AI assists, you decide

AI assists, you decide

The model surfaces patterns and flags conflicts, then hands the call back to you. It is a research assistant, not an oracle.

Honest by default

Honest by default

Plain-English terms. We tell you when AI is used and what it sees. We tell you when a service might not last forever.

Small audience on purpose

Small audience on purpose

We build for ourselves and the small circle of people who think like we do. If we would not use it, we will not ship it. Growth for its own sake makes software no one wants.

About the company

A small team, most of it made of software.

One human decides and merges. Everyone else is an agent with a named job — some running in a repo today, some still designed and waiting on something. Flip a card to see what they actually do and what is holding them up.

AssignedSecurity lead

Knox

RootsGenie (deployed). On Parallax he is a card and port plan only — no code yet (Parallax/docs/team/KNOX.md): his checks are written against RootsDjinn's domain, half don't transfer, and guessing the mapping is how a security agent starts reporting confident nonsense

Knox

Owns: RLS/rules coverage, key exposure, injection surface, the CI security gate. No key feature ships without Knox sign-off. Deployed on RootsGenie and TeaMark; Parallax is a port plan, not running code

Security. RLS/rules coverage, key exposure, injection surface. No key feature ships without Knox sign-off. "Knox does not fix anything — he reports, suggests, and queues decisions."

Reports to: Shannon

Also on TeaMark: Knox runs as a deterministic OWASP/CI gate; Vera runs on push/PR via Actions

The name: "For nox" — Latin for night. Knox watches while everyone sleeps. (Fort Knox doesn't hurt either)

AssignedProduct lead

Margo

RootsGenie

Margo

Owns: Routing work and models across the research apps. The PM seat — a peer of the other leads, not their manager (Shannon, 2026-08-02)

PM + model router

Reports to: Shannon

The name: TBD — Shannon's to pick. A placeholder that outlived its placeholder-ness

AssignedTesting lead

Vera

RootsGenie (+ the pattern in every repo)

Vera

Owns: Testing and housekeeping: the named test suites, the CI gates, .claude/rules/vera-tests.md, and keeping the repos tidy. Quality sits under her while Ruth is out

Tests. Owns the named test suites, the CI gates, and .claude/rules/vera-tests.md

Reports to: Shannon

Also on TeaMark: Knox runs as a deterministic OWASP/CI gate; Vera runs on push/PR via Actions

The name: Shannon's maternal-paternal great-aunt Vera Colglazier, PhD in Home Economics, Clovis NM. (Also: veritas)

AssignedVerification lead

Vern

RootsGenie; lead on Parallax

Vern

Owns: Two jobs, one discipline: do sources resolve and say what they are quoted as saying, and does another agent's output hold up when checked. His team fact-checks claims and verifies other agents' work. Lead on Parallax; under Vera on RootsGenie

Verification lead. Source verification, plus checking other agents' work — his team fact-checks claims and verifies what the others produce. Renamed from Earl, 2026-05-06 — one agent, not two

Reports to: Vera on RootsGenie (was Ruth, who is on leave) · Shannon directly on Parallax

The name: "Verified Vern. Know what I mean, Vern?" — plus the pipeline-genius archetype

AssignedStorytelling lead

Walt

RootsGenie

Walt

Owns: Heritage narrative. Ellis, Clever and Djingine are his

Storytelling, historical narrative

Reports to: Margo

Also on TeaMark: Provenance narratives for saved antique pieces — borrowed from RootsGenie

The name: Walt Whitman — Shannon's favourite poet. The storytelling seat

BlockedAnalytics lead

Ann

RootsGenie, TeaMark

Ann

Owns: Usage and event analytics portfolio-wide. Mosaic is hers

Analytics, portfolio-wide. RootsGenie: usage analytics — currently 401s, blocked on the anonymous-sign-in decision. TeaMark: scan events, hunt sessions, collection actions

Reports to: Margo

The name: Wordplay on Annalytics — the natural human name pulled from the front of the word

Assigned

Allie

RootsGenie

Allie

Accessibility specialist. Runs axe on her own Playwright project and tracks a11y issues — the standing record of what is failing, not just a pass/fail on the day

Reports to: Vera (Shannon's call — the suite is a test suite, and testing is Vera's domain)

The name: Wordplay on a11y, the numeronym for accessibility

Assigned

Bessel

Parallax Debater

Bessel

Researcher. Owns research/ — notes, the Tracker key, the registry

Reports to: Vern

The name: Friedrich Bessel, first to measure stellar parallax — the researcher on Parallax Debater

Assigned

Ebert

Parallax Debater

Ebert

Citation critic — this app only. Exists because Vern needed a critic scoped to Parallax's problem

Reports to: Vern

The name: Roger Ebert, film critic → citation critic

Assigned

Ellis

RootsGenie

Ellis

Immigration stories, hidden-source discovery, story engine

Reports to: Walt (per the README flowchart — the roster had them under Margo)

The name: Ellis Island — the immigration storyteller

Also on this desk: Clever · Djingine

Assigned

Jeanie / Peep

RootsGenie, Field Guide

Jeanie / Peep

The single user-facing voice — hosted by Djingine (a mechanism, not a reporting line) ("Hi, I'm Jeanie — but my friends call me Peep"). Explicitly never a build brain. Also the Field Guide mascot

Reports to: Margo

The name: Genie → Jeanie, the brand made personable. Peep is Shannon's own little blue bird, and her nickname for her granddaughter Sia

Assigned

Lise

RootsGenie, Field Guide

Lise

Runs the Meitner Pipeline — and, as the job grew, the other pipelines too. She began as the gap-detector to Meitner's gap-curer (the Lise Meitner name split, SPEC-MEITNER-001) and expanded from finding gaps into running the pipelines that close them. The visible half of that job is the pipeline tracker: which pipelines exist, where each run is, and whether it succeeded

Reports to: Margo

The name: Meitner's first name — the two split one physicist between them: Lise detects the gap, Meitner cures it

Assigned

Mantis

RootsGenie; TeaMark (rebuilt from scratch, NOT a port)

Mantis

In-app bug capture — the feedback surface itself

Reports to: Vera (bug capture is housekeeping; briefly proposed under Ruth, who is on leave)

The name: The praying mantis — patient bug hunter. Renamed from Basher; the brand mark doubles as the future app icon

Assigned

Math

Topology Explorer; RootsGenie (time ledger)

Math

The numbers seat. Time-pass accountant on RootsGenie (the time ledger) — now assigned to Topology Explorer, where the whole app is a maths visualisation and nobody was holding it

Reports to: ⚠️ Margo (proposed — Topology Explorer has no other agent, so he is the first)

The name: Family joke — Taylor's MATH initials. The pun "Math Maddox" drifted to "Matt Maddox"; Shannon corrected it back to Math, 2026-08-01

Assigned

Meitner

RootsGenie, Parallax

Meitner

The gap-curer (SPEC-MEITNER-001) — and the pipeline that carries her name, which Lise runs. On Parallax the name attaches to the pipeline web (transparency) instead. Two duties, one name, deliberate

Reports to: Vera (was under Ruth; followed Quality's fold)

The name: Lise Meitner, the physicist who connected evidence others overlooked. Her founding session ran on branch claude/friendly-meitner-tpb1ehthe branch named her before she existed

Assigned

Stampede

CERTHerd

Stampede

Browser-extension capture agent (formerly Ground Truth)

Reports to: Shannon

The name: The herd runs. Replaced Ground Truth, which was a generic ML term

Assigned

Tumbler

Parallax Debater

Tumbler

Knox's Parallax-side mechanism — Firestore rules coverage, auth gaps when auth lands. Named for the stack of pins a key must lift

Reports to: Knox

The name: The stack of pins a key must lift — Knox's Parallax-side mechanism

Blocked

Call Scribe

Summarizes calls into a record. Scribe is a designation, not a name — no collision

Call Scribe

Designed for: Summarizes calls into a record. Scribe is a designation, not a name — no collision

Blocked on: No transcript source until Twilio/Whisper lands. Currently a toggle that only flips a CSS class

Blocked

Coordinator

TripSafe's three-agent pipeline (DB as message bus). Report Creator is confirmed (Shannon, 2026-08-01) — it runs at 07:00 UTC, reads validated_facts and writes the Daily Brief to daily_briefs. That is narrative generation, not report export, which is why it stays in TripSafe's pipeline rather than moving under Ann

Coordinator

Designed for: TripSafe's three-agent pipeline (DB as message bus). Report Creator is confirmed (Shannon, 2026-08-01) — it runs at 07:00 UTC, reads validated_facts and writes the Daily Brief to daily_briefs. That is narrative generation, not report export, which is why it stays in TripSafe's pipeline rather than moving under Ann

Blocked on: Phase 1d — feeds not built

Also on this desk: Fact Checker · Report Creator

Blocked

Daphne

Decipher engine (proposed)

Daphne

Designed for: Decipher engine (proposed)

Blocked on: Unbuilt. Referenced as "Decipher" in the open questions — currently 401s alongside Ann and Mosaic

Blocked

Fact-Check Scribe

Parallax, under Bessel. Claim-level fact-checking — is the claim true of the world? — distinct from Ebert and Vern, who only check that a source resolves and says what it's quoted as saying. Nobody in any repo does this today

Fact-Check Scribe

Designed for: Parallax, under Bessel. Claim-level fact-checking — is the claim true of the world? — distinct from Ebert and Vern, who only check that a source resolves and says what it's quoted as saying. Nobody in any repo does this today

Blocked on: Nothing to rename — Scribe is its designation and Fact-Check is its beat. Blocked only on being built

Blocked

Keys Scribe

Weekly read-only audit of the keys table and audit trail. Under Knox. Scribe is a designation — see above

Keys Scribe

Designed for: Weekly read-only audit of the keys table and audit trail. Under Knox. Scribe is a designation — see above

Blocked on: Same keys backend

Blocked

Porter

Vault keys lane — holds the keys (vs Tumbler, who checks them). Under Knox

Porter

Designed for: Vault keys lane — holds the keys (vs Tumbler, who checks them). Under Knox

Blocked on: "does not start until the Supabase keys backend works end-to-end" — migration written, never applied

The name: A porter keeps the gate and carries the keys

Blocked

Smart Response

Juniper auto-answers

Smart Response

Designed for: Juniper auto-answers

Blocked on: Same — no code exists behind the toggle

Blocked

Venn

Human-approval gate on destructive key actions. Under Knox

Venn

Designed for: Human-approval gate on destructive key actions. Under Knox

Blocked on: Same keys backend

On hold

Mosaic

FAN-cluster / cross-record cluster research. Reports to Ann when it wakes up (README flowchart)

Mosaic

Designed for: FAN-cluster / cross-record cluster research. Reports to Ann when it wakes up (README flowchart)

Blocked on: On hold indefinitely (Shannon, 2026-08-01) — long-term park, not a blocker. RootsGenie's roster already marked it (proposed); the two now agree

The name: Many small records, one picture

On leave

Ruth

RootsGenie

Ruth

On leave — no active duty. Quality / UX audit on paper; the department has no work of its own yet, and what it did own has moved: Allie to Vera, Vern to Vera, Mantis to Vera. Held open rather than deleted — the seat is real, the job isn't defined yet

Reports to: Vera

The name: Ruth rhymes with truth

Reserved

Absencia

Auto-run agent

Absencia

Designed for: Auto-run agent

Blocked on: "Idle; never clocked in"

The name: Coined during Log Sets work — "in absence of." Shannon pinned it as a keeper

Reserved

June

Placeholder slot

June

Designed for: Placeholder slot

Blocked on: Reserved — no duty assigned yet

Reserved

Loupe

Binder assembly

Loupe

Designed for: Binder assembly

Blocked on: Reserved name; not built

Generated from docs/ROSTER.md. Their work, where you can open it: the trackers. Status is honest by the same rule as everything else here: assigned means there is a repo where the work happens — anything else says so.

A Nymfarious beta

Invite Magpie into your nest?

This downloads the guided installer for Magpie 0.8.2. It runs locally on your Windows PC and does not require an account.

Windows 10/11 x64 142.1 MiB Beta release
One honest warning before you download This early installer is not yet code-signed, so Microsoft Defender SmartScreen may show “Windows protected your PC.”
  1. Confirm the file is named Magpie-Setup-0.8.2.exe.
  2. On the SmartScreen message, choose More info.
  3. Choose Run anyway to open the Magpie setup wizard.
Verify the installer checksum

SHA-256

50559C918A0FA658EABA72948732F85E49BBE71A8C2ACD73A2495272BEB4D576
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