How to Use Developer Labs to Build, Share, and Fork Projects

Developer Labs is a collection of free browser-based tools built for frontend and API developers who need to move fast without wrestling with setup. Each lab handles a specific piece of the development workflow — design tokens, API contracts, or mock data — and all three share a common infrastructure for saving, versioning, sharing, and forking your work. This guide walks through what each lab does, how the project management layer works, and how to use sharing and forking to collaborate without friction.

The Three Labs

Developer Labs currently includes three tools, each focused on a different part of the frontend and API development process:

Project Management: Versions, Names, and Metadata

Every piece of work you save in Developer Labs becomes a project. A project has a name, the tool it belongs to (Brand Token Studio, API Contract Lab, or Mock Data Lab), and a content payload containing your actual work. Beyond that, the system tracks metadata automatically:

• Version history — Every time you save, a new version is created. You can browse previous versions and restore any of them as the current state without losing the versions that came after it. Restoring is additive, not destructive.
• Timestamps — Created and last-updated dates on every project and version, so you always know what changed and when.
• Soft delete — Deleting a project removes it from your list but doesn't erase the data immediately, giving you a recovery window if you change your mind.

The project list view shows all your saved work across all three labs, sorted by most recently updated. Each project card shows the tool type, name, and last-modified date.

Sharing Your Work

Sharing is where Developer Labs moves beyond a solo scratchpad into something collaborative. Any saved project can be shared with a single action:

1. Open the project you want to share
2. Generate a share link — this creates a unique URL
3. Send the link to anyone

The share URL follows the pattern wigleystudios.com/developer-labs/shared/{token}. Anyone with the link can view the project's current state without needing an account. They see your design tokens, API contract definitions, or mock data structure exactly as you saved it.

Share links are revocable. If you want to stop sharing, unshare the project and the link stops working. This gives you control over what stays public without deleting the project itself.

Forking: Build on Someone Else's Work

When you view a shared project, you can fork it into your own account. Forking creates a complete copy of the project — all content and metadata — under your ownership. From that point forward, your fork is independent: changes you make don't affect the original, and changes to the original don't affect your fork.

Forking is useful for:

• Adapting shared design tokens — Fork a teammate's Brand Token Studio project, then adjust colors and spacing for a different product line without starting from scratch
• Extending API contracts — Fork a shared API Contract Lab project and add endpoints for a new feature while keeping the original spec intact
• Customizing mock data — Fork a Mock Data Lab project and modify field types or add new properties for your specific testing needs

Each user's project limit is enforced at fork time, so you'll need available project slots in your account. The forked project shows up in your project list like any other project you created.

Workflow: Putting It All Together

The three labs are designed to connect naturally through a typical frontend development workflow:

1. Start with Brand Token Studio. Define your color palette, type scale, and spacing tokens. Export as CSS or JSON.
2. Move to API Contract Lab. Define or import the API endpoints your frontend will consume. Generate mock responses and code snippets.
3. Generate test data with Mock Data Lab. Use your API contract's response shapes to create realistic mock data for development and testing.

At each stage, save your work, version it as you iterate, and share the results with your team. When someone joins the project later, they fork your shared work and have a running start instead of rebuilding context from scratch.

Individual Lab Guides

Each lab has its own dedicated guide with deeper coverage of features and output formats:

• Brand Token Studio Guide — Token types, export formats, and Tailwind integration
• API Contract Lab Guide — Spec parsing, mock generation, and Postman export
• Mock Data Lab Guide — Schema input, data generation, and export options