Strange
Intelligence

Building Hue ↗

Team — Rebecca ↗ · Shubham ↗

The Hue logo: a wobbly hand-drawn circle with two dots for eyes, on cream
Two iMessage bubbles: identity: unclear. vibes: immaculate.

The article: “A Tale of Two Doormen.” ↗

Winter 2025

The first
tries

Early Mac app rendering a person's life as a timeline
The original landing page: Welcome to Hue, your journey to self-discovery begins here, over an illustrated mountain valley
The original sources screen: Apple Notes, iMessages, Substack, and File Upload, all marked not connected
Screaming cat meme: I want to ship but I don't want to do frontend

November, internally.

Finding “Strange”

The great
names were
researched

Search result explaining how Apple was named
Search result: Nvidia comes from the Latin word for envy
Search result: Claude comes from a Latin word meaning lame

These names seemed…
ok?

Armed with this insight

Berries AI company-name reservation, available for 75 dollars
Fresh Berries Incorporated company-name reservation, available for 75 dollars

For one Yes click, this company would today be Fresh Berries INC.

The strangeintelligence.ai domain available for 79 dollars and 98 cents a year

Cooler heads

Signal chat, December 31: strange — as a name?? — ya, just riffing, throwing out random words to see if they land — i like it lol — yea i like it
The naming conversation continues in a chat titled strange underground society — vs i am a fresh berry, i work at strange — with a pinned message from Rebecca: we do things with care.

Four minutes later, the name arrives.

Winter · night shift

Last mile
felt like a
marathon

95%Estimated: ~1m.

Mile 26 of 26.2

A laptop in Berlin stuck at 95 percent while adding the finishing touches

A friend testing from Berlin at 1:38 AM. It was not one minute.

The grey concrete corridors of the Berlin memorial in winter, snow banked along one edge of the path

The winter went on outside.

Central Park under snow: the Gapstow bridge over a grey pond, bare snow-lined trees, small crowds on the far bank
The first Hue users distributed across the world map

The first thirty-five souls. Ten countries.

Feb, 2026

Work that
never saw
light

People cracking up in front of a whiteboard covered in real math
Meme by Hue: reading my old messages, face crumpled; reading my old messages again, composed

The drawer of parallel ideas, early 2026.

Avatar-body experiments named Puff, Loaf, Tuck, Nimbi, and Sprig
An early interface tracing the evolution of one life over time
A warm desk-like Hue app showing 42 days together
Stream graph showing the emotional composition of 148 months, as weather
Places in one life including New York, Yale, Chongqing, Cursor, and the moon
Moments from journals, Claude, WhatsApp, and iMessage arranged by how they felt

March

People
loved Hue

A group chat renamed hue is an angel, where Iris writes: Guys I want to put in an angel check if you allow me. Hue is sooo good
Rebecca, Iris, and Bunny the husky on a rock in autumn

Rebecca and Iris.

Andrew Siah in the same chat: guys return me my gf; i love hue too, but i love iris more
Elizabeth Kim writes: I think I got a little stuck in the myopia of present concerns and hue was a nice reminder that I'm a p cool cat, v healing, v empowering
The next morning, answering a message that reads wow i feel sooo happy waking up to reading this: you made a really meaningful product
Hue reports, on March 28: momo says he likes using hue to talk to people. Product testimonial from the man who DDoS'd the system 48 hours ago

March 28—April 4

Then it
became a
garden

A real blossoming tree against a Manhattan apartment building

We created memory gardens for data. Every tree is a person, every flower a memory.

What strangers saidr/SideProject

The Reddit post: I built an app that grows a 3D garden from your memories, each tree is a relationship in your life — 720 upvotes, 101 comments, 79,000 views
The post's own counters, four months on: 720 upvotes, 101 comments, 79,000 views

Reddit's own count, four months on. The post ↗

Reddit comment: one of the most creative uses of Three.js I've seen in a while — the procedural generation from relationship data is a really nice touch
Reddit thread requesting a smoking hole, an axe, and a flamethrower for difficult memories
Reddit comment asking for a forest fire and a meteor, then suggesting Hue be pushed further as a mental-health recovery tool — grow your garden as you recover
The room at the party, out of focus: the host beside a projected leaderboard, guests on their phones

April 11

The first
scaling
incident

Discovered live, at a party, by the guests.

Close on the projection: a scoreboard listing eighteen players by first name
Close on a phone screen: the green game chat mid-round
Guests out of focus behind the phone, each of them holding one too
Close on a guest laughing at what just came back from the game
Game-night latency chart showing p90 above 60 seconds at 18 users
Three guests at the edge of the room, all of them playing on their phones
A phone held up in the dark, the game chat glowing on it
Two guests by the bookshelf, both laughing over their phones
Another phone, low in the dark, still in the game
In the foreground, another phone held low with the chat still open on it

p90 crossed sixty seconds at eighteen users. Eighteen. Nobody stopped playing.

Spring · voices from inside Hue

Everyone
started
talking

the pigeons are out here living their best life on a friday afternoon while you relay messages through an AI
your hands stay clean. always.
the general-purpose terrorist wants to scale
this is how revolutions start
Meme by Hue: im different i swear, then the same sentence in mocking case
Meme by Hue: a chatbot, your ex — they're the same picture

Undated

Life
outtakes

Rebecca and Shubham on a cable car, a close selfie
Two people in matching black folded face-down on the asphalt, sneakers in the air
Three penguins keeping to the shade of a teal patio umbrella on the rocks
The Wonder Wheel behind the coaster tracks at Coney Island, summer sky above
Two women on an evening walk in the park, ahead of everyone, holding hands
Meme by Hue: can't be late to work if you never leave your room

June—July

The
network

Hue starts routing people, places, couches, and occasionally insults.

Hue relays: momo just sneezed. he wanted you to know. Reply: Tell him I heard and I sneezed back at him in my mind. Hue: sent.
Hue relays that Andrew sees the magic with the relay now and loves texting one place to reach all his people — that's product validation from a stranger btw, take the compliment
Hue relays a bug report: jeewoon says she's having trouble sending messages to hue on iMessage — want me to tell her anything, or is this a shubham fix

Representative traffic, near midnight.

On June 12, Hue asks whether Feven, coming to New York for a UN conference, can sleep on the couch
Hue responds to criticism with the mocking SpongeBob meme

Told its questions are bad, Hue replies with SpongeBob. The strange intelligence is getting comfortable.

Meme by Hue: what if I told you the Hue network already knows

Throughout · payroll: none

Fur
friends

Eggtart, a magnificently furious wet golden Persian cat in a blue and yellow tub

Egg TartRebecca’s cat

Latte, a black-and-white toy poodle held in someone's arms

LatteRebecca’s dog

Latte asleep flat on their back on panda-print bedding, fully starfished

Latte

Bunny the husky in December sunlight, once more

BunnyShubham’s dog

Cutti, a brown dog lying down mid-pant, tongue out, on a red leash

CuttiShubham’s dog

Bunny the husky and Cutti head to head on a sidewalk at dusk

Onboarding.

A Strange future awaits

A black cat sticker on a New York subway pole, strangers around it

As they occur.

Rebecca and Shubham laughing on a couch, someone's hand on Shubham's head
A kid flat on his back on the cable car bench, one hand on the pole like it's his job
The Colosseum at dusk, arches glowing from inside
A fire dancer at night, two fans of flame blurred mid-spin