Field notes from DZG STUDIO
Building, changing my mind, and writing down why.
Short, honest notes: what I measured, what I got wrong, what I cut, and the manuals that make each tool easier to use. When the rest of this site makes a claim, this page holds the receipts.
The three moves
What to build, what to refuse, and what stays private.
Making Ideas Visible
How data-science pattern discovery became a second pair of eyes for everyday thinking.
Read the journey ↗Not a Refrigerator
A first-use test turned a proud, feature-heavy interface into something quieter. The user needed the result, not the gears.
Read the story ↗The Whole Route Stays Local
Recognition, cleanup, and safe delivery to the cursor were designed as one private route, not a pile of separate features.
Read the guide ↗Build journeys & field notes
The stories behind the products.
17 GB of Junk That Wasn’t Junk
A confident scanner found 16.9 GB to remove. The files were still backing two installed simulators.
Your Coding Agent Is Eating Your Disk
A measurement of 72.6 GB across Codex, Claude, and Cursor. And a fix that preserves every conversation.
On-Device Intelligence, and Knowing When to Stay Quiet
The harder question was not how to classify files, but when Mint should act and when it should ask.
Why We Went Native
What Mint learned by moving from a fast cross-platform prototype to software designed around the Mac.
The Mess We All Share
Different files, same pattern: digital clutter accumulates faster than most people can organize it.
Why Mint
Why a name that suggests care and renewal fit better than one that simply described cleanup.
Why Alder Runs Multiple Speech Models
No single local model wins every language, so Alder measures quality and routes each language quietly.
The Hard Part of On-Device AI Isn’t Inference
How large local models reach real Macs reliably, recover from interruption, and stay verifiable.
Dictation That Never Loses Your Words
How Alder protects a spoken thought through silent microphones, interrupted sessions, and blocked fields.
The Art of Restraint
Cutting 20% of the features because the foundation mattered more than the skyline.
Between Building and Using
What changes when the builder and the person getting interrupted by the product are the same person.
The UI You Never Think About
The control panel that is enjoyable to build is often not the experience that is enjoyable to use.
Real Interruption Pain, a Smaller Promise
The demand evidence, technical boundaries, and launch thresholds behind Scene.
Need an answer, not a story?
Open the manual.
Mint’s product manual covers setup, organization, cleanup, redaction, automation, and the safety model behind every change.