The studio is new. The practice isn't.

We've been building for the web since the late nineties, when a site was a folder of files we uploaded by hand and hoped for the best. The tools have been replaced several times over; the method hasn't: work out what someone actually needs, build the smallest thing that does it, then make sure it still works on a quiet Tuesday when nobody is watching.

That has meant language technology and production systems alike: writing the logic by hand to catch a grammar mistake in Swedish; preparing the data machine learning systems run on; and keeping the unglamorous plumbing between the things a business already runs on, where an outage is somebody's emergency, not a ticket in a queue.

That's also how we know when a language model is worth the money, and when it's an expensive way to avoid writing code.

We've done all of it remotely, for teams in Europe, Asia and Australia, long before remote work needed a name.

Barkada is Tagalog for the small, tight circle of friends who actually turn up. That's the size we intend to stay, and roughly how it feels to work with us.