Lantern

An AI chat for small teams, as a native desktop app: it reads what the team has connected, shows its working, and stops to ask before anything leaves the workspace.

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Studio concept · 2026 · Product design, Prototype

Lantern's home in a dark desktop window: a prompt asking what to work on, recent sessions, the season's activity and this week's numbers

A Lantern session as a chat, in dark: the question as a bubble, what it worked through with its sources, the drafted release note, and the Slack post it is waiting to be allowed to make

Lantern's working, enlarged: each step it took, where it looked and how long it spent, and the line where it stopped to ask

Lantern's prompt box in six states side by side: empty, mentioning a Linear project, files attached, the thinking menu, the permissions menu and a reply arriving

Lantern on three dark phones: a new session with the keyboard up, the thread with its steps and the drafted note, and the Slack post's approval as a sheet of grouped rows

Lantern's connections and memory: the tools it can read and write, how often each was used this week, and the things it remembers about the team

Signing in to Lantern on three dark phones over the dithered painting: the mark, the name and the ways in; the six-digit code from the email; and the workspace to join

Maps © OpenStreetMap contributors, served by OpenFreeMap. Placeholder company marks by Logoipsum. Portraits from Unsplash.

the project

Lantern is a made-up product for the nine-person software company that already has an AI chat open all day and still can’t let it near the real work, because nobody can see what it looked at or stop it before it posts.

The home asks one question, what should we work on, over a painting dithered to a dot screen and a few suggested asks that name the tools they would reach into. A session is a thread: the question, a single line saying what Lantern read and how long it took, and the answer with every claim pointing back to the issue, pull request or page it came from.

The working opens into a list of steps anyone on the team can read. Lantern can read whatever has been connected without asking, but anything that leaves the workspace, a Slack post, an email, a change in Xero, stops and waits for a person. That line is drawn in the prompt box itself, beside how hard it should think.

Connections sit on one page: which tools it can read or write, who connected each, a week of use drawn as a small graph, and the routines that run on them. The phone app carries sessions and approvals, so a post can be let through from the bus, and signing in happens over the same painting.

what we shipped

A dark native home over a dithered painting, with the prompt and suggested asks
A session as a chat, its working folded under one line and opened in full
The prompt box in six states, including the model and permission menus
Connections with a week of use per tool, a phone app with approvals, and signing in

next project

Relay PilotDesigned and shipped an automation platform that lets teams build, test, and deploy workflows without code.

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