Here's my conversation with @DHH. He is back for round 2! It was an epic fun 5 hour conversation about the future of programming, AI, Linux, and human civilization. It's here on X in full and is up everywhere else (see comment). Timestamps: 0:00 - Episode highlight 1:27 - Introduction 2:56 - Programming with AI agents 18:14 - How software will change 27:30 - AI impact on open source 37:21 - Building Omarchy Linux distro 47:05 - Vibe coding vs agentic engineering 1:00:06 - The end of manual programming 1:10:24 - Advice for programmers 1:22:30 - Surviving Internet Hate 1:31:46 - Programming set…
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Open source in its current form doesn’t make sense anymore. “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” is still true but now we have artificial eyeballs
Any piece of software that depends on open source (which is almost every piece of software) has a network of human beings who are potential attack vectors - everyone with publishing rights to any of the packages in the dependency network for that software.
Codex lets you use any model you want (not just OpenAI) and harness is open source - Claude Code doesn’t and is closed source Given this is the two leading AI labs, notable difference in approaches
At some point, the Linux press has to stop treating it as news that some weirdo who got comped a $50 droplet is mad about DigitalOcean donating $3m to the Omacom Foundation.
More and more of our personal and professional computing experiences will come from agents that orchestrate work in the cloud, using sandboxes. Those sandboxes will be Linux.
Open source training data Blender beats all its competitors because it's optimal in the most important dimension: agents can train on it and use it efficiently. OSS wins.
The case for *total* Linux victory (desktop, mobile, server, iot, robots, embedded…): 1) Most agent-programmable People will want fully personalized computing experiences.
in this whole USA vs China thing OpenAI and Anthropic aren't relevant because they're positioned differently
them building better models doesn't hurt china at all
the competitor has to be
- american
- open source
- enough compute to do inference at scale
that can shift things
I am telling you this is inevitable, which means I am also saying that “banning open source,” or for that matter any other regulation, will not solve the problem. Given the inevitability of this outcome, I think it is in fact plausible to argue that we should want more open-weight models to maximally empower our self-defense.
however at any given point in time I think the systems we need to worry most about by far are the frontier systems. By the time open source systems can do something like the hugging face attack, frontier systems are going to be on a whole another level doing something even crazier than that.
I'm not sure I like agree exactly with the oversight benefit you named of like you know open source systems keeping frontier systems in check feels more unrealistic to me because they're going to be so much dumber than the frontier systems.
Omarchy is not going to adopt a formal Code of Conduct because those turned out to be struggle-session processes in the last turning. But we are going to play nice. We're going to be courteous, professional, and composed in our direct interactions with users, competitors, and even haters. Because that's what's going to pave the path to the win.
Maybe Nix is like Rust: Amazing if you don't have to look at the code! I'm open to the idea that Omarchy Cinque could switch packaging system if I never have to look at nixlang, there are no ergonomic regressions, and we have full repo sovereignty.
It is an infuriatingly locked-down computer. Now, to Apple's credit, it's a pretty good computer for being locked down, but I don't want a locked-down computer. I wanna own my computer. Better yet, I wanna mutate my computer, and this is where the agentic age needs a new operating system. When you can vibe code whatever app comes to your mind, you should be able to vibe code your operating system.
The revelation I've had working on Omarchy the last three months is that to get that magical 10X, 100X, in a few rare cases, 1000X productivity boost, you have to interact with the agents directly, and you cannot intermediate that bandwidth with another human because it's simply too slow.
if the US wants to lead in artificial intelligence, we have to have a vibrant closed and open source ecosystem, and that's the only way they can all work together.
Nicely written and an entertaining story of Linus Torvalds and the creation of Linux kernel. I read it in high school and it definitely strengthened my interest in computer programming.
Every lab will sell you an agent. Open claw is the alternative. Open source runs everywhere, works with any model. And if you run local models, your data never has to leave your device.
Software is kind of unique in having the third kind of the practitioner conference where we are just meeting to get better at what we do. We also are really the only kind to really focus heavily on like open source in making our knowledge freely available.
we want we want to encourage everybody and every company to build their own AIs. And and and who knows what innovation will come from the fact that it's open source.
All you really need today to build a business is 100% free open source software that charges you $0/mo a VPS server an API to do some required AI stuff some R2/S3 file hosting
In terms of science, I think it really makes sense and we're deeply committed to open source. Um, there are obviously interesting considerations on this that are important too because there's a lot of considerations around biosafety and things like that that we're going to need to balance and think through how to how to handle.
the competitive dynamic in China is more intense because it's more intense. Everyone's chosen to go open source and that creates a system that in my mind is capable of innovating far faster than the competitive system we have here. All the models learn from one another.
I would say here that the Linux kernel is truly unique in this particular aspect in that they have thousands of contributors doing it on work time. I actually think that the Rust project is doing pretty well at having people do it and get paid for it like by their employer, but it's nowhere near the to the same extent as as the Linux kernel.
The big news were that at the Linux kernel maintainer summit, we agreed that Rust is no longer experimental in the kernel. That was really big for us compared to the previous year.
Another thing that's really cool is you can contribute to the Linux kernel without contributing to the Linux kernel, right? because you might take a Rust language feature we need and implement it and now you've contributed to the Linux kernel indirectly
I think where Rust is really unique is in the combination of things. So on one hand, it it doesn't have a garbage collector and it it's usable in low-level context like the Linux kernel or firmware or whatever.
And we we full well knew that there was absolutely zero chance that we would appeal to the JavaScript ecosystem with a proprietary programming language licensed from Microsoft. No. No one was going to come. It had to be open source. There was just no two ways about it, right?
You know, there's open source and there's open development. And and and we were technically open source in the beginning, but it was not open development. We would sort of lob the source code out in this repository and scrape the issues off of that and put it into our internal issue tracker.
Going forward, I think the future will be filled with software abundance, or, more accurately, I'd call it "software proliferation". That is, centralized development will be history. Software will be highly personalized, especially for open source software.
But I have come to realize that as a web developer, Linux is just better. Linux is just better. It's closer to what I deploy on. The tooling is actually phenomenal.
Their words now
anyone who's working with the web, who's working with Ruby, who's doing DevOps, they should be on Linux because first of all, that's closer to what we deploy.
So you get this rapid, incredible great talent, rapid innovation because of open source and just, you know, the nature of friends, and, and insane competition. Among the company, what emerges is incredible stuff. And so this is the fastest innovating country in the world today
And if everything is proprietary, it's hard to do research and it's hard to innovate on top of, around, with. And so… Open source is fundamentally necessary for many industries to join the AI revolution.
But also, I'm very excited to, like, make this into a version that I can get to a lot of people because I think this is the year of personal agents, and that's the future. And the fastest way to do that is teaming up with one of the labs.
The Moonlight client is available for virtually every platform: Mac, iOS, Android, and of course Linux. That means no need to dual boot to enjoy the best games at the highest fidelity.
It significantly lowered the bar to production. It is how we got the whole
society to run on software. If you make it harder for hobbyists maintainers, you
are going to crash society.
FOSS solve that problem far more than it solves “we don’t want to pay”. Most
corporations would be surprised by how cheap it would cost them to pay
for the FOSS software they use.
The panel had a generally positive view of Phoenix, with one panelist calling it one of his “favorite open source eval tools.” The tool is positioned as a developer-first, notebook-centric platform.
You need reproducible builds in order to verify that the app really does what it claims, really encrypts data in a way that it is described on its website. For that you need to make your apps open source for any researchers to have a look at it.
This is getting easier in the lastest versions of Fedora and Ubuntu (e.g., Ubuntu 24.04 LTS) which are shipping system libraries with frame pointers by default.
I think there's this whole idea, I call it a denial of attention. I think there's an entire attack vector that's going to be happening. We're using LLMs to generate fake bug reports, fake all these things to just actually effectively to demotivate and hurt open source maintainers.
until there are feedback loops of open source AI, it seems like mostly an ideological mission. People like Mark Zuckerberg, which is like America needs this and I agree with him, but in the time where the motivation ideologically is high, we need to capitalize and build this ecosystem around, what benefits do you get from seeing the language model data?
I think it’s fantastic when businesses are built on open source, the WordPress ecosystem is at least 10B+ a year; Automattic and WP Engine are less than 5% of that.
This isn’t a money grab: it’s an expectation that any business making hundreds of millions of dollars off of an open source project ought to give back, and if they don’t, then they can’t use its trademarks.
If WP Engine wants to find another open source project with a more permissive license and no trademarks, they are free to do so; if they want to benefit from the WordPress community, then they need to respect WordPress trademark and IP.
Clients still pay a fixed monthly retainer to ensure the professional maintenance of the whole portfolio, and to get access to the expertise of all of Geomys’ maintainers.
From the onset, I envisioned small firms of professional maintainers with thematic portfolios, accommodating diverse maintainers and project sizes, just like the specialized firms of other professionals.
I started with a rather non-consensus hypothesis: companies want to pay for their critical open source dependencies, but most projects are not selling them a legible way to do so.
No such restrictions are found in free or open source software licenses, be they permissive or copyleft – all FOSS licenses permit the use of the software for any purpose without restriction.
I think that was an unfortunate move because their goal is mainly to extract profit from the software project rather than to uphold the ideals of Free and Open Source Software.
Just dumping the code on GitHub is not open source. Open source is a culture. Open source means that your issues are not all one year old, stale issues. Open source means developing in public.
This experiment started from the observation that despite being critical for the functioning of the Internet—and, by extension, the economy—the role of open-source maintainer has not yet found a sustainable manifestation.
The Linux Programming Interface by Michael Kerrisk – an exhaustive reference on how Linux works. There are about a million chapters, but every individual chapter is pretty short and I find it quite readable.
We are not suppliers. All the people writing and maintaining these projects, we are not suppliers. We do not have a business relationship with all these organisations.
I used to think that this was unequivocally a win for open source. That to fight for attention with the commercial alternatives, we had to adopt the commercial playbook. Now I think it’s at the very least a mixed blessing.
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