With every project we ship, we try to become a better version of the studio we were last quarter. We keep ourselves abreast of the tools, technologies and trends that move through this industry — and we put time and capital behind the ones we believe in, well before a client asks us to.
Most of our R&D output starts here: arrows, boxes, a question someone has been turning over for a week. Once a quarter the whole studio steps out of client work for five days, and the diagram on the wall is the only deliverable that matters.
Read the essays →Most studios in Hong Kong are paid to deliver last year’s stack on this year’s deadlines. There is little internal pressure to learn anything new before a client asks for it, and the work quietly drifts a year or two behind.
We try to invert that. A fixed share of every working week, and one full week per quarter, is reserved for work the studio pays for itself — internal tools, AI experiments, infrastructure rewrites, essays, conference talks. Each engineer’s ten-percent learning time runs in parallel.
The output ends up in client engagements the next quarter — cheaper, faster, and with fewer surprises than if we had learned on someone else’s clock.
A small, opinionated framework for measuring whether a model or prompt change actually improved the output. Built because the off-the-shelf eval frameworks are either too academic or too tied to one vendor.
Reusable building blocks for the patterns that recur across HK retail, F&B, and finance apps: bilingual content management, MTR-friendly nav, HKID validation, Octopus / FPS integrations, member-tier UX.
Investigating how far open-weights models (Qwen, Llama, Mistral) can be pushed on dense legal & financial retrieval, running entirely on hardware the client controls. The answer matters for every HK advisory firm we work with.
The tooling that lets one or two of our engineers sit inside a client’s operation and ship faster than a team of five would: provisioning, observability, internal-admin scaffolding, customer support tooling.
We don't fund speculative bets on five-year horizons. Every lab project must plausibly show up in a real client engagement within twelve months. If it can't, it isn't a fit for us — that is for venture capital, not for a services studio.
A small win on a boring stack (Postgres, a cron job, a clean queue) usually beats a flashy framework that nobody on the team can debug at 3am. Our internal tools are deliberately under-engineered.
If a tool we build for ourselves has no commercial value to AccordHK as a product, we open-source it. Not because the world demands it, but because the act of preparing a repo for the public forces us to write the documentation properly.
An essay shipped is research published. Every senior engineer is expected to publish one piece of long-form writing per year — on what they learned, what they got wrong, or what they think the rest of HK should be doing.
The small, opinionated framework from Lab 01. Used internally on every AI engagement; published as a starting point for HK SMEs.
A small TypeScript form & validation kit that ships English and Traditional Chinese error messages in lock-step. The validation rules our HK clients keep re-discovering they need.
A Traditional-Chinese-first tokeniser tuned for HK product search. Outperforms the default Postgres + jieba pipeline on small HK corpora.
Reference flows for HK payment methods — Octopus, FPS, AliPay HK, WeChat Pay HK — that have actually shipped in production apps, with their gotchas documented.
The CLI we use to spin up a new client project: Next.js + Postgres + auth + a sensible analytics setup, ready to ship in an hour.
How we write code, write English, write Chinese, write commits, write postmortems. Public because new joiners shouldn’t have to wait until day one to see how we work.
Adjunct teaching slots, internships and applied research collaborations with two HK universities — quietly, on terms that respect everyone's IP.
AWS Advanced Tier, GCP partner, plus formal access programmes with Anthropic, OpenAI and Mistral for client deployments needing reserved capacity.
Pro-bono engineering hours for two HK SME associations, and yearly talks on AI adoption for trade groups in F&B, retail, and logistics.
Trusted partner studios in Taipei, Tokyo and Singapore for projects that need local presence beyond Hong Kong. We pass work both ways.
If you’re a researcher, a vendor, an industry association or another studio looking to collaborate — write to us. We’re selective, but we always read.