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chapter one — the word

A short book
about being
productively idle.

Everything you'd want to know about the studio, arranged as a slim volume. We kept it short because we respect your time and, honestly, ours. Start at the top or jump to whatever sounds least boring.

a late afternoon at the studio
The Miskincin studio on a late afternoon — team at work, Miskin the cat on the desk
Late afternoon, a cat on the desk, everyone in their own thing. Most days look like this. Not a press shot — if it were, nobody would have turned around.
i. — etymology

The word
on the door.

Miskincin. Turkish, invented, fondly worn. A compound that shouldn't work: miskin (idle, listless, a little feline) meets a suffix that makes it its own pleased opposite. It means lazy, but fast when the task earns it.

We chose it because it described us before we'd written a single line of code together. The kind of people who will rewrite a shell script for an hour to avoid six minutes of clicking. The kind of people who redesign the kitchen before making tea. Who turn a small irritation into a tool, a strange question into a game, and an unfinished conversation into a story.

Laziness, in our reading, is not the absence of effort. It is an opinion about where effort should go. It should go somewhere permanent. Once. With taste.

“The lazy person and the engineer agree on more than you'd think. Both hate repetition. Both suspect most meetings. Both believe that the correct number of times to solve a problem is one.”

— internal memo, probably unsent

ii. — mission (short form)

What we're
here to do.

We make games, tools and stories with a small, stubborn reason to exist. Sometimes to remove a frustration. Sometimes to make room for a good puzzle, a strange thought, or one more chapter.

m·01

Make friction a first-class bug.

If a screen makes you sigh, we treat it the same way we treat a crash.

m·02

Use AI like a scalpel.

In the right places it disappears; in the wrong places it charges monthly.

m·03

Charge fairly, or don't charge.

Price transparency is a feature. Dark pricing pages are a red flag.

m·04

Build for ten years, not ten days.

We avoid architectures that will cost our future selves a weekend.

m·05

Design for the cook, not the menu.

Real workflows before feature lists. Always.

m·06

Rest is part of the plan.

We book it into sprints. Tired teams don't ship good work.

iii. — vision (long form)

The long game
(played slowly).

Ten years out, we want to run a small, financially independent studio with a careful catalogue of games, tools and stories that people return to for years.

Most software is designed to perform well in the first five seconds and forgotten by the thirtieth. We want the opposite. We want work that ages gracefully, that someone quietly recommends to their sibling, that doesn't need a quarterly reinvention to remain interesting.

The distant vision is a catalogue of ten projects. Maybe fifteen. Useful tools, games worth another round, stories worth following. Work that still has a reason to be here a decade later. A small, boring, wonderfully sturdy company.

We are in no hurry. That's rather the point.

These are target windows. We update the page when the work moves the calendar.

iv. — polite refusals

Things
we will not
build for you.

A short and slightly rude list, mostly for our own benefit. If any of these describe your brief, we'll send you to a competitor with a handshake and no ill will.

  • ·no· Apps whose business model is boredom. infinite scroll, goodbye
  • ·no· Subscriptions priced to punish you for forgetting to cancel. cancel in two taps or it's a bug
  • ·no· AI features added because the word is on every competitor's landing page. vibes-driven roadmap
  • ·no· Dark patterns. Pop-ups that pretend to be your friend. Guilt-coloured “No thanks” buttons. pattern ≠ persuasion
  • ·no· Onboarding flows that outlive the actual product. seven screens of shame
  • ·no· Data collection we wouldn't explain, out loud, to a concerned aunt. the aunt test
v. — operating notes

How we
actually work.

The shortest possible map of how things get made at Miskincin. Printed here mostly so we can stop explaining it at parties.

We use AI loudly, internally.

Behind the curtain, we lean hard on generative tools: code review, translation, content scaffolding, edge-case hunting. Sometimes AI also belongs in the product. Either way, it has to earn its place by doing something useful. The label alone gets no desk here.

We prototype with the real thing.

No wireframes that lie. We build the tiny end-to-end version in the real stack and poke it on a real phone on a real commute. Decisions made in Figma die in the subway.

We write English like we mean it.

Product copy is a design surface. We argue about verbs the way other studios argue about border-radius. If a sentence wouldn't hold up in a magazine, it doesn't ship in our work.

We finish, then nap.

Sprints end on Fridays. Fridays end early. Monday is for reading what the users actually did with the thing. Rinse. Repeat. Try not to ruin it.

vi. — frequently implied questions

Things
you were
about to ask.

Wait, so what is "AI-first" here, actually?
It means we consider what models can usefully do while shaping the work, from research and code to a feature that belongs in a project. We check the result, keep what helps, and explain the role when it matters to the person using it. Putting AI in the headline is easy. Giving it a sensible job takes a little longer.
Do you take on client work?
Occasionally. Two or three pieces of outside work a year, usually something we find genuinely interesting or with someone we'd eat dinner with. If that sounds like you, the contact page is two clicks from here.
Why Istanbul?
Because we live here. Because the bread is good. Because the time zone sits politely between Europe and the Americas, so meetings either happen early or over a late coffee. Because the city teaches you, daily, that chaos and elegance can share a sidewalk.
Are you hiring?
Yes-ish. We grow slowly and hire from our own audience. If our voice makes you laugh in the right way and your work makes us jealous in the right way, say hi and we'll find a coffee.
Why do your pages look like a magazine?
Because good writing survives three redesigns and hero sliders don't. We'd rather look like something you'd leave on a coffee table than something you'd scroll past on the way to a sign-up form.
end of chapter.

Met us
(sort of).

Keep reading if you enjoy portraits of small teams, or skip straight to the projects.

Meet the humans → See the projects