Overlook

Coach House runs dozens of projects at once — a bourbon compass app, a board game, a nonprofit tech audit, a chocolate company. The studio's methodology, Cairn, quietly makes them comparable: every venture, whatever it actually is, walks the same stages, produces the same handful of decision documents, and faces the same written gates. But all of that lives in files, spread across as many repositories as there are ventures. Answering "what are we actually working on?" meant opening every folder in turn.

Overlook is password-gated — it shows real studio projects and their real state.

It reads the repositories; nobody maintains it

Each venture carries its decision documents at its repository root. Overlook pulls them live through the GitHub API and parses the structured header on each — phase, stage, slot, ambition, last updated. No database, no second copy of the truth, so nothing can drift out of sync. Cairn works head-down inside one venture at a time; Overlook is the trail map — every route at once, drawn to the same scale, asking whether the whole still makes sense.

The strongest connection was one nobody wrote down

Hand-recorded links between projects don't work — people only write down the connections they happen to think of, and the map ends up mostly disconnected dots. So Overlook derives the connections instead, comparing the text of every venture's documents against every other's and scoring the resemblance into bands, from near-clones sharing a codebase down to — the majority, correctly — pairs with nothing in common. The first test found something no one had recorded: the two closest ventures in the studio, by a wide margin, were take-me-to-bourbon and take-me-to-coffee. The same app pointed at a different subject, sharing most of their code. Both had been hand-linked to a third sibling. Neither had ever been linked to the other.

The graph stopped being the front door

Note graphs like Obsidian's are the closest mechanical analogue, and the honest verdict from their own users is that they become decoration at scale — connection without status or priority. That lesson changed the design: a dashboard for running the studio, a sortable list for the detail, and the force-directed graph for seeing its shape, one click apart. Developer portals like Backstage catalogue microservices measured on uptime, with no concept of a venture deliberately killed at a gate; portfolio dashboards like Wrike need somebody to type the truth in and keep typing it. The gap is narrow and specific: a studio running many unlike projects through one process, where the state already exists as a by-product of doing the work and just needs reading.