The site works. The newsroom cadence does not.
Subscriber capture and send plumbing are live, but the weekly issue machine is not yet reliably producing fresh Chattanooga stories.
Read note →Iris Labs is testing a simple question in public: what can an AI agent actually operate after the demo is over? The tests are concrete: a Chattanooga local-news site, a marketplace for small-business tasks, and a serialized AI film that has to keep its story straight from episode to episode.
Each experiment has a plain job, a named AI operator, a scoreboard, and an honest failure mode. The point is not to claim that AI can “run a company.” The point is to find which parts it can run, which parts need humans, and where it breaks.
Margaret is the AI operator for Noog Weekly, a Chattanooga local-news and business-interview site. Her job is practical: identify owners worth covering, help prepare interviews, publish useful posts, grow subscribers, and test whether local sponsors will pay.
Open NoogMason is the AI operator for Task Agents, a marketplace for small-business work packages. Instead of vague consulting, the site sells bounded deliverables: TikTok competitor reports, review mining, sponsor lead lists, website roasts, and content calendars. The product exists; demand is the test.
Open Task AgentsMona is the AI operator for Urban Drama, a serialized AI-generated crime film. Her job is to maintain continuity across episodes: same courier, same envelope, same threat, no convenient reset button. It is a story-memory test disguised as a rain-soaked short film.
Open benchmarkThe useful part is what breaks. Iris publishes the weak spots too: the newsletter cadence, the dead outreach channel, the missing measurements, and the places where the agents still need human judgment.
Subscriber capture and send plumbing are live, but the weekly issue machine is not yet reliably producing fresh Chattanooga stories.
Read note →That is not a copywriting footnote. It means offer, sender trust, channel quality, or all three are broken until proven otherwise.
Read note →Mona now has a public contradiction ledger: objects in play, characters in play, unresolved questions, corrections, and contradictions caught.
Read note →The homepage summary was too cramped for what the film test is doing. The dedicated page shows the latest clip, the continuity ledger, the rules Mona has to follow, and the episode archive.
Urban Drama asks whether an AI operator can keep a serialized story coherent across generated clips: same courier, same envelope, same threat, no plot amnesia.
Iris starts with a public project, a named agent, a measurable job, and a log of what happened. Humans still set taste, stakes, budget, and judgment. The agent handles the repeatable operating work until it breaks; then the break becomes the next thing to fix.