Why Alcheva Labs exists.

My five-year-old was trying to play a game on the iPad. Every three minutes, the game stopped and an ad played. The ads weren’t even for the game they showed — they were bait, a fake gameplay clip that, when tapped, dropped you into something completely different. He’d get frustrated, hand me the iPad, and ask me to make it stop.

I couldn’t make it stop. That’s how the game was built. That’s how most games for kids are built now.

I sat with that for a while, and the thing I kept coming back to wasn’t a games problem. It was a software-economy problem.

The same extractive logic that interrupts a five-year-old’s game shows up in the software I work with in my day job — systems built around what’s easiest for the company to ship and bill for, not what’s easiest for the person who has to use them every day. It shows up in the youth sports tools I deal with as a parent and as a volunteer helping run local leagues — software so bad that the volunteers run spreadsheets and group texts on the side, because the official tools make the easy parts hard.

None of this is a mystery. Software gets built that way because the people who could fix it can’t justify it inside a normal company. There’s not enough money in a great kids’ game without ads. There’s no growth story in fixing the registration flow for a 200-kid soccer league. The economics force every team that wants to survive into the same extractive playbook, even when none of the people involved actually want to be there.

What’s changed is the velocity.

I’m a chemical engineer by training — Notre Dame for the undergrad, Georgia Tech for a master’s in mechanical engineering. My career has been spent translating complicated, messy systems into a sequence of problems that can actually be tackled. That’s what an engineer does. The domain shifts; the work doesn’t.

What I’ve watched happen over the last two years is that the same problem-decomposition skills that used to take a team of engineers six months to act on now take one person six weeks. The AI tooling I use in my day job, and the AI tooling I’ve been pulling into my own projects at night, has made the gap between I can see how to fix this and the fix is shipped smaller than it has ever been. By a lot.

That changes the math.

You don’t need a team. You don’t need a round of funding. You don’t need a million users to break even, because the costs are radically lower and the build cycle is radically shorter. Which means, for the first time, you can build the kinds of things that the old economics wouldn’t let you build. Software that’s for people rather than aimed at them.

Alcheva Labs is what I’m doing about it.

It’s a studio. A small one — me, working in the workshop. The work falls into three buckets, and the three are deliberately not the same:

Games, because my son and every other kid deserves something to play that isn’t a slot machine in a friendly skin.

Systems, because the day job has shown me where the well-built version of common software would change someone’s whole week, and almost nobody is building it.

Utilities, because the youth sports league down the street is being run on tooling that wastes everyone’s time, and the parents and volunteers keeping these things alive deserve software that respects them.

The three belong together. The pattern underneath them is the same: a problem worth solving, a person who has to live with it, and a build cycle short enough that solving it is finally economically possible.

This site is the workshop’s front door. Lab Notes — the entries you’ll find here — is where I’ll write about what’s currently in circulation, what shipped this week, what broke, and what I learned. Some posts will be short. Some will be long. None will be filler.

The first product, Subplot, is shipping in the next few weeks. Lab Note Nº 002 will be the build log for it. After that, the work continues — there’s a youth sports utility taking shape, a few systems experiments I want to write up, and at least one more game I owe my son.

There’s a reason the studio is called what it’s called. Chemical engineering is, more or less literally, the modern descendant of alchemy — the work of arranging raw inputs into something more valuable. That work is older than software, older than industry, older than almost everything else we do. AI is just the gasoline on the fire, moving the work at something close to alchemical speed.

That’s what this place is for.

— Chris