Terms, in English

The terms for reading Lab Notes, joining Software Makers, and working with Rich.

The deal

Richard Steinmetz operates Loop Labs, publishes Lab Notes, and runs Software Makers. Your offer or mentoring plan describes the service, price, currency, and schedule you agree to buy.

Software Makers membership

The current Software Makers plan describes its package. Direct paid membership costs $97 USD per month and renews monthly until cancelled. You can cancel anytime and request a no-questions refund within your first 30 days. Contact Rich using the support details below if you need help cancelling or requesting a refund.

The Software Makers terms describe cohort eligibility, seats, participation, and optional Slack access. Paid membership does not guarantee a seat in a particular cohort. Deleting an app account or withdrawing from a cohort does not cancel a paid subscription; cancel through the platform where you purchased.

Optional mentoring arrangements

As an optional experiment, a MentorCruise plan may include group sessions at no extra charge. Rich confirms the group and included access before you join; existing one-to-one commitments remain in place. Purchases, billing, cancellation, and refunds stay on MentorCruise under its terms and your agreed plan. The direct membership offer above does not replace those purchase terms.

Group privacy and your work

You keep ownership of your work. Share only code and information you have permission to share with the group. Keep other participants' private information, code, and session contributions within the group unless they give permission to share them. Do not publish a recording, transcript, screenshot, or testimonial featuring another participant without their permission.

The Software Makers privacy notice explains who can view private session records, how recording, transcription, and AI-assisted analysis work, and how to request correction or deletion. Joining mentoring or a group does not require a public profile or newsletter subscription.

What we promise

• The work is real. Everything published here, we ran ourselves first. If something turns out to be wrong, we correct it rather than quietly deleting it.
• The service follows the agreed offer. Group participation and individual mentoring are different commitments; your plan says which you receive.
• The applicable refund policy is honoured. Purchases follow the terms of the platform and offer you chose.

What we very deliberately don't promise

• Outcomes. Compensation targets are goals we coach toward, not guarantees. Nobody can promise you a raise, and anyone who does is selling something worse than this.
• That the advice fits your codebase. The notes are lab reports, not prescriptions. You're a senior engineer — apply judgement. That is, after all, the entire point of the lab.
• That an AI agent won't do something stupid on your behalf. Read the diff. Seriously. Read the diff.

The content

The writing here is ours. Quote it, link it, argue with it publicly — all encouraged, a credit and a link is plenty. Don't republish whole posts as your own, and don't feed the archive into a content mill to spawn forty spun versions. Agents reading on behalf of a human are welcome; there's a llms.txt and a Markdown twin of every post to make that easy, precisely so you don't have to scrape.

Support

A page misbehaving, a checkout doing something alarming, or a question about your mentoring: email rich@looplabs.cc. For a purchase through another platform, use its billing and refund process; contact Rich if you need help.