Crane Zhou

Independent researcher at The Companion Lab — testing LLM companion apps, network payloads, and bank statement descriptors.

Joined on Jul 29, 2025 https://thecompanionlab.com

Crane Zhou

Nov 3

Inside Phantom Blade Zero's PBZS v3 Save Format (AES-256-GCM + Oodle Kraken in the Browser)

#gamedevwebassemblyjavascript

4 min read

Crane Zhou

Nov 2

I Know Nothing About Barcodes. Here Is Why I Built a Barcode Website Anyway.

#webdevsaasseoshowdev

5 min read

Crane Zhou

Nov 1

Amazon Ended FBA Commingling on March 31, 2026: How to Print Multi-SKU FNSKU Sheets Without Wasting 60% of Your Avery 5160 Stock

3 min read

Crane Zhou

Nov 1

Everyone Is Building AI Wrappers. So I Built a 72-pt PostScript Barcode Engine for Angry Warehouse Sellers.

#buildinpublic #saas #softwaredevelopment #startup

3 min read

Crane Zhou

Oct 31

Why 30-Up Avery 5160 Barcode Sheets Drift by 4.2mm (and How We Built a 1:1 PostScript Point Imposition Engine)

#webdev #javascript #ecommerce #opensource

4 min read

Crane Zhou

Oct 29

Building an Open-Source AI Agent for Self-Hosted Media Acquisition & Multi-Drive Routing

#opensource #selfhosted #ai #docker

4 min read

Crane Zhou

Oct 25

Benchmarking 7 Cloud Storage Providers for Streaming Encrypted Manga on Android (123 ms on Bunny, 30s Stalls on Drive)

#opensource

5 min read

Crane Zhou

Oct 24

I Read a 179KB Inline Chat Bundle on an AI Companion App: 4 API Bugs the UI Hid (Updated: All 4 Fixed in 48 Hours)

#testing

6 min read

Crane Zhou

Oct 23

Best Character.AI, Replika & CrushOn Alternatives (2026): We Sent 9 Apps the Same 6 Messages & Checked Our Bank Statement

#ai #llm #webdev #benchmarks

4 min read

Crane Zhou

Oct 22

What 7 AI Companion Apps Actually Put on Your Bank Statement (And What Runs Under the Hood)

4 min read

Crane Zhou

Aug 18

I built a coding agent skill that writes you a course and quizzes you on it

#claudecode #ai #productivity #tutorial

5 min read

Crane Zhou

Jul 7

I gave an LLM agent write access to my cloud drive. Three bugs taught me how to constrain it.

#ai #nextjs #typescript #agentaichallenge

6 min read

DEV Community

Crane Zhou

Badges

One Year Club

Writing Debut

Inside Phantom Blade Zero's PBZS v3 Save Format (AES-256-GCM + Oodle Kraken in the Browser)

I Know Nothing About Barcodes. Here Is Why I Built a Barcode Website Anyway.

Amazon Ended FBA Commingling on March 31, 2026: How to Print Multi-SKU FNSKU Sheets Without Wasting 60% of Your Avery 5160 Stock

Everyone Is Building AI Wrappers. So I Built a 72-pt PostScript Barcode Engine for Angry Warehouse Sellers.

Why 30-Up Avery 5160 Barcode Sheets Drift by 4.2mm (and How We Built a 1:1 PostScript Point Imposition Engine)

Building an Open-Source AI Agent for Self-Hosted Media Acquisition & Multi-Drive Routing

Benchmarking 7 Cloud Storage Providers for Streaming Encrypted Manga on Android (123 ms on Bunny, 30s Stalls on Drive)

I Read a 179KB Inline Chat Bundle on an AI Companion App: 4 API Bugs the UI Hid (Updated: All 4 Fixed in 48 Hours)

Best Character.AI, Replika & CrushOn Alternatives (2026): We Sent 9 Apps the Same 6 Messages & Checked Our Bank Statement

What 7 AI Companion Apps Actually Put on Your Bank Statement (And What Runs Under the Hood)

I built a coding agent skill that writes you a course and quizzes you on it

I gave an LLM agent write access to my cloud drive. Three bugs taught me how to constrain it.