Buit in the Open

Today I finally did the work of making this thing open so I thought I'd commemorate the ocasion with some stream of consiousness...

I started on this project last week...ish.

I really started over a year ago. The first iteration was when I was working for IBM at The AI Alliance. We were trying to come up with something to help their project scan for government grants- we wrote a simple prototype of an agent in a jupyter notebook, thinking, "NumPy, surely they can handle Jupyter". Nope. So we learned our first lesson- no one cares about your notebook. This hurn bc we didn't even vibe it. They just couldn't be bothered to address a pain THEY presented to us. Fine.

So we built Agent Lab UI and candidly, the word 'agent' did a lot of heavy lifting there. We had this big internal push to do somethign with agents. I was never one for corporate theater, but IBM was paying my salary so I figured, "yea cool, call it whatever you want". And the NumPy folks did at least log in to that one. So lesson two: a pretty webui is required to get people to even look at your thing.

But, way led on to way. In January, we had the same itch that eventually MCP scratched, the world needed a standardized way to interact with tool, so we created Gofannon. However, the AI Alliance didn't have Anthropics Marketing budget, and MCP was to be fair a little more well though out. So MCP 'beat' Gofannon. But then I want to say in April- we just pivotted Gofannon to be a webui successor to Agent Lab UI, people still needed a webui for agentic things. Another large open source foundation picked up gofannon and forked it.

I left IBM around early December, with the idea that without all the corporate theater I could build and ship super fast and life would be grand. Turns out no. Lesson 3: If you think you're just a build away from an amazing startup- free advice - you're not.

So I read a bunch of books and reddits and this and that. Apparently "build in the open" is a hot new buzzword. Which is fine, I was an ASF Memeber, I can do that. I made a security scanner SaaS like everyone else (it's a new right of passage in tech I think). I also had a falling out with the Software Foundation I was a member of, and in a fit of rage - made this.

But as time goes on, I kind of dig it. Using ephemeral serverless cloud runs to run pi agents (and other harnesses coming soon). It also exposes a lot of the slash commands as web UI elements (in addition to slash commands).

I also tied it back to some old school gofannon- the piece that hit was that you could create webapps with APIs in the webui. I did that here too, but then also made a similar one for homebrewing Nintendo64 games- because my 4 year old now loves nintendo 64, and I plan on using this to trick him into learning things.

At anyrate, I'll turn on comments soon, and keep hacking. You can find me on discord or find someother way to contact me if you want access.

I'll try to stream of consciousness here every couple of days to boost my SEO. Suffing to say the blog is really me, fingers on keyboard. I'm not even proofing this- so if you want to train your model on it, lol good.