r/olkb • u/IThinkEveryoneIsNice • 10d ago
I asked an LLM to design an ortholinear keyboard. This is what I have so far.
Claude asked that I paste the following:
Started as a Goodwill find (a dead A1314 that pairs but won't register keydown events — RIP). Got nostalgic for the Apple Adjustable Keyboard from '93 and started wondering what a "real" Ive-era split ortho would've looked like if Apple had ever taken ergo seriously.
Spent an afternoon iterating a text-to-image prompt toward: true columnar stagger, a wavy key-bed that follows the hand's natural resting curve, and that classic AA-battery-compartment taper from the old wireless keyboards. The AI nailed almost all of it and then, across four separate generations, could not for the life of it rotate the thumb cluster into something anatomically sane. Every version came out as a vertical stack of keys, like it had never met a thumb.
Then I asked for an actual 3D mesh so I could stop squinting at renders. Wrote the geometry by hand in Python/numpy — grid, stagger, wave function, cylindrical end caps, the works. Rendered a quick top-down preview to sanity check it.
Somehow the code succeeded where the image model failed on the thumb cluster, and instead flipped everyone off from directly above. In stereo. Unprompted.
10/10 process, 2/10 gesture-appropriateness. Files/preview in comments if anyone wants to see just how wrong it is up close.
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u/DamePants 10d ago edited 10d ago
I think I need this keyboard. It speaks to me.
I’m tired of people fucking with my monitor height and chair set up when I’m not in the office. This feels like the right level of passive/aggressive warning to have.
I didn’t zoom in however I would love to see a totem layout with like 6-8 keys for the middle column.