# Sideband Lab

> Interactive visualizations that map the agent-era infrastructure shift. Companion to the Sideband newsletter (https://sideband.pub).

Each project is a small data-driven argument: a chart, a simulation, or an interactive layout, paired with sourced data and the underlying methodology.

## About
- Author: Shawn Yeager (https://shawnyeager.com)
- Newsletter: https://sideband.pub
- Source code: https://github.com/shawnyeager/sideband-lab
- License: CC BY 4.0 unless noted otherwise per project

## Projects
- [The money goes in circles](https://lab.sideband.pub/circles/) — Nvidia invests in, backstops, or leases from the customers who buy its chips. AMD, Microsoft, and Google run the same loop. Nearly half the quantified demand has seller money on the other side of it. (2026-07-14)
- [Who owns the index](https://lab.sideband.pub/the-index/) — ARD makes agent discovery possible. The registry that ranks results controls what agents can reach—the same question search answered thirty years ago. (2026-07-01)
- [The corridor closes](https://lab.sideband.pub/corridor/) — Frontier API prices have fallen 430×. Open-weight alternatives fell faster. The margin corridor between what frontier providers charge and what the market will pay has collapsed from $29 to under $1—and frontier providers are now operating below their own cost floor. (2026-06-19)
- [Where the 430× goes](https://lab.sideband.pub/inference-trap/) — AI token prices fell 430× in five years. But the same five years turned one-off chatbot queries into resident agents that burn 100× the tokens. For an always-on agent, most of that 430× never reaches the bill. (2026-06-03)
- [The AI market hyperscalers can't reach](https://lab.sideband.pub/cloud-cant-follow/) — Armada raised $230M to deploy modular AI data centers to military bases, oil platforms, and air-gapped facilities. The raise is a map of how far AI's addressable market extends beyond the cloud. (2026-05-29)
- [Task complete. Safety violated.](https://lab.sideband.pub/safety-trap/) — BeSafe-Bench tested 13 production-grade agents. Not one cleared 40% safe task completion. The agents that performed best on tasks were the most dangerous in practice. (2026-05-27)
- [The return of the computer](https://lab.sideband.pub/return-of-the-computer/) — For three decades, infrastructure primitives got shorter—30-minute sessions to 10ms hops. Agents reversed the curve back to hour-long tasks. (2026-03-17)
- [Payment Required](https://lab.sideband.pub/http-402/) — x402 requires Coinbase to verify and settle every payment. L402 requires no one. The protocol your agent uses decides who can shut it off. (2026-03-07)
- [Agent-Era Infrastructure Map](https://lab.sideband.pub/map/) — Who's building the agent stack—and how open is it? Companies and protocols scored on openness and distribution across five infrastructure layers. (2026-03-03)
- [U.S. GDP Status](https://lab.sideband.pub/status/) — What if LLM uptime was a macroeconomic indicator? A status page for the economy, where the components are AI providers and the metric is GDP. (2026-03-02)
- [Agent payments have a three-body problem](https://lab.sideband.pub/three-body-problem/) — Who controls agent payments? A force simulation of the three-way gravitational fight between state regulators, card networks, and open protocols. (2026-03-01)

## Audience
Founders, builders, and investors following AI infrastructure shifts. Assumed familiarity with APIs, payment rails, agent architectures, stablecoins, and Lightning.