The Lab is a staging ground. Every tool on the homepage spent time at /lab first, often for weeks, before earning a Production-status entry in the homepage Modules grid.
The promotion criteria are intentionally narrow:
1. **Does it solve a real problem we have?** Not a contrived demo. WhoAmI exists because we wanted a privacy-first answer to "what does my browser leak?" — Weather Dashboard exists because we wanted theme-consistent forecast visualization on our own domain. If we wouldn't open the tool ourselves, it doesn't ship.
2. **Is the code worth reading?** The repo is the product as much as the deployed site. Every shipped module has a paired design spec (docs/superpowers/specs/) and an implementation plan with checkbox-tracked tasks (docs/superpowers/plans/). Code that needs a 2000-line clever-trick to express a 200-line idea doesn't graduate.
3. **Does it pass the access-then-privacy gate?** WCAG 2.1 AA for keyboard and screen reader. No client-side data collection without explicit consent. No third-party scripts that pull user data off the page.
What deliberately doesn't matter for graduation: visual polish, feature completeness, framework hype. Those iterate after launch.
**Why The Lab page itself stays plain.** The cards on /lab use the bordered Card variant with no flashy hero. The signal is intentional — these are prototypes, not finished products. When something earns a homepage slot, it gets the AccentCard treatment with brand colors and a "Latest from The Lab" entry. The visual hierarchy maps to the engineering hierarchy.
**Coming Soon cards are visibly disabled.** Tools listed in TOOL_LINKS with available: false render with opacity-60 + cursor-not-allowed + a "Coming Soon" badge. Clicking them does nothing — better to set expectation up-front than to land a 404. The same pattern repeats on the homepage Modules grid and the 404 page's "Available Experiments" suggestions.
**Why both /lab and homepage list the same tools.** The homepage Modules section is the public face for visitors who hit the root URL. /lab is the indexed table of contents. The duplication is by design: the homepage prioritizes the available tools (with full description cards), /lab gives an even-handed list of everything in flight including the unavailable.