From the Lab, September 2025

This quarter, we’ve deepened our focus on high-performance builds and collaborative partnerships. Whether working alongside design studios, internal product teams, or brands directly, we’re consistently achieving premium quality production.

Nukepedia, a long-standing VFX community site, was first launched in 2010 and had become unreliable, slow, and reliant on an outdated platform. After a couple of hacks the site’s owner Frank Reuter was finding it increasingly stressful to run. Despite its age, the site hosted a passionate community of professional video editors and VFX enthusiasts sharing tools, techniques, and knowledge. When Auckland-based media production studio Assembly recommended us, we were brought in to give the site a modern, functional home.

The old site often took up to 30 seconds to load a single page and was overwhelmed by nearly a million spam accounts. Our goal was clear: make it faster, easier to use, and visually contemporary, while preserving the collaborative, experimental spirit that makes the community unique.

Frank and his partner have always run Nukepedia as a labour of love, not for profit, which meant working within a tight budget. We approached the project creatively, aligning development with our Supermodel platform and contributing some extra effort as goodwill. It was a careful balancing act, but one we were proud to take on.

The new Nukepedia launched in time for Frank’s presentation at SIGGRAPH 2025, the world’s largest computer graphics conference, and the response from the community was overwhelmingly positive. For us, it reinforced how thoughtful design, collaboration, and technical care can revitalize a project and empower a passionate community.

Vibe coding (using AI-generated code to assemble an app quickly) is opening exciting new possibilities for rapid prototyping. It allows great ideas to be expressed visually and functionally in days rather than months. We recently saw the upside of this first-hand when a client brought us an iPhone/Android app they had effectively vibe-coded. The concept was strong, the user journey was clear, and the personality of the product shone through. It was a great starting point, but under the surface, there were issues that would need significant re-engineering to meet production standards.

Our task was to take this almost-finished app and make it feel truly native on both platforms. That meant re-engineering much of the code to improve performance, correctness, and maintainability, while also aligning the look and feel with the expectations of iOS and Android users. Working within the constraints of a system built largely without an architecture presented significant challenges: every improvement risked uncovering another brittle dependency or hidden flaw. The alternative – starting over – had been rejected early on, because so much of the app appeared “done.” In reality, though, salvaging the project within its existing structure proved to be costly and time-consuming.

This illustrates a real threat of vibe coding for our industry: the illusion of completion. An AI-assisted build can create something that looks close to finished but hides critical shortcomings under the surface. Retrofitting these systems to meet production-ready standards can be more expensive than building them properly from the ground up. Cactuslab gained a key insight during this project; investing in solid engineering from the outset is the surest way to control costs, ensure quality, and deliver an experience that both performs beautifully and stands the test of time.

— Grant Berridge, Senior Developer at Cactuslab

Links to recent blog posts, shoutouts, talks, or recognitions.

• Parentland launch announcement featured in Scoop – Proud to be the tech partner on this one with Nigel Latta.
• Huge update to the Letterboxd Android App – Our team made a massive contribution to get this off the ground.  Nearly a year in the making!
• Matt and Karl attended IP3 2025 in Victoria, Canada – A celebrity event sharing insights on creative collaboration with some of the world's most interesting people.

We were thrilled to see the Best Awards website rise to the challenge on awards night. With a huge wave of visitors arriving at once to check out winners and finalists, the site performed flawlessly. Pages loaded instantly, navigation stayed smooth, and there were no hiccups under heavy demand. For us, it’s a proud moment that reflects the care we put into building and supporting a platform worthy of New Zealand’s premier design event.

Over the past few months, we’ve been meeting with several leading design agencies and are excited to be exploring new collaborations. The approach is simple: we let the designers focus on what they do best, crafting exceptional creative experiences, while we build precise, reliable frameworks that ensure those designs are supported with integrity and built to last. Together, this balance of creativity and technical strength is producing work we’re really proud of, and we’re looking forward to sharing more soon.

Looking to partner? We engage with projects that start as low as $10k+.

Get in touch!