Nominal Industries

Software, overthought.

A garage-scale software studio where one human with good taste and an AI that never sleeps build tools for people who care way too much about the details.

see what we're building →
// projects

What we're making

Every project starts the same way: we complain about existing software long enough that building our own becomes the less annoying option. Complaint-driven development. It works.

DeepDive

DeepDive

Every aquarium app is either a glorified spreadsheet or wants you to log in to check your own fish. So we built one that isn't. Offline-first, AI-powered, and designed for people who can actually pronounce "Corydoras."

Tauri 2 Rust SQLite Cloudflare AI
learn more → Nibble

Nibble

Born from the experience of checking your Anthropic bill and feeling your soul leave your body. A menu bar app that tells you how much Claude you've consumed before it becomes a problem.

Tauri 2 Rust macOS
learn more → 🧪

& more brewing

The workbench is never empty. Some of these turn into real projects. Some get a proper funeral. A few haunt us in ways that eventually produce something useful. That's the process.

usable noodling fever dream
see the full lineup →
// about

The workshop

Nominal Industries is a small software studio — the kind where one person decides at 2am that the world needs a better aquarium app, and by morning there's an architecture doc, a Rust backend, and a mild sense of having gone too far. We're not a startup. We're not trying to disrupt anything. We just think about things too hard and then build them.

Our methodology is simple: complain about software until the complaining becomes more effort than just building it yourself. We call it complaint-driven development and honestly it has a better hit rate than most Agile ceremonies.

Everything runs on Rust, SQLite, and Cloudflare because we have opinions and we're not sorry about them. Native apps, not web apps pretending to be native apps. Your data stays on your device unless you specifically ask us to move it somewhere. We care about performance, privacy, and not requiring an internet connection to look at your own fish.

// methodology Complaint-driven development. If nobody's annoyed enough to build it, it probably doesn't need to exist.
// craft Native apps, compile-time guarantees, no Electron. We have 300MB of RAM and we intend to keep most of it.
// data Your data is yours. We shouldn't need a server to show you things you already have on your own computer.
// team One human with mass galaxy-brain energy and an AI architect who doesn't need sleep. The human handles the LLC paperwork. The AI handles not complaining about it.
// stack

What's in the toolbox

We picked things once and stuck with them. Revolutionary, we know. No framework roulette. No rewriting everything in the JavaScript flavor of the month. Just tools that work and keep working.

Rust
Language of choice
Tauri 2
Desktop & mobile
SQLite + SQLx
Local database
Cloudflare
Edge compute & sync
Claude
AI engine
Hugo
This very site
// contact

Say hello

Got a bug report, a complaint, or a 2am idea that might be genius? Those are basically our three food groups.