# Omarchy! Omarchy! Omarchy!: every episode Weekly Omarchy X Space hosted by @ncfrontiersman and @NixFred. Every Sunday, 3pm EST, live on X. Site: https://omarchyspaces.com. Generated 2026-09-27. # EP 01: Omarchy! Omarchy! Omarchy! Part of "Omarchy! Omarchy! Omarchy!", the weekly Omarchy X Space. Every Sunday, 3pm EST, live on X. - Recorded: Sunday, September 13, 2026, 3pm EST - Length: 95 minutes - X recording: 1:11:47 - Speakers: 7+ - Tuned in: 130 - Hosts: @ncfrontiersman, @NixFred - Listen: https://x.com/i/spaces/1nxeLMVNppbJX - Post on X: https://x.com/NixFred/status/2099250845116469273 - Web: https://omarchyspaces.com/ep/01/ ## Summary (as posted on X by @NixFred) Omarchy! Omarchy! Omarchy! X Spaces Episode 1: Listen here: https://x.com/i/spaces/1nxeLMVNppbJX Recorded Sunday, September 13, 2026, on X Spaces. 95 minutes, 7+ speakers. First of many. See you next Sunday! What came out of it was better than a show-and-tell. Underneath the demos there's a set of hard problems every person on that call is hitting from a different angle, and some are solved some not. The second half of this is about those. The first half is what got said. WHO WAS IN THE ROOM: @ncfrontiersman Wes built OmaStorm, the NEXRAD radar plugin, and is in the mix on Omarchy Mac. Me, co-host: Blip & Infomarchy. @thisisgm who wrote Flea. @gh_TechLuddite, 13 years at an MSP, found the security holes in Blip, building Opinionated Omarchy and Omarchy Fleet. @thetundeo in London, runs ZeroRAMP, hosting the first Omarchy London meetup on September 24. Joel, Rails developer, built http://omarchyguild.com. @MuchmoreIT, a 25yr friend, Slackware 1.0 vintage, AMD only, $1B PB data centers.. @1280MHz, who found us through OmaStorm. @Wappy_x, who wants to know when Apple Silicon M4 lands. A chemical and electrical engineer running Omarchy on an old Windows laptop who called himself "a hardcore vibe coder." Plus a room full of awesome folks who just listened. PART ONE: WHAT WE TALKED ABOUT The infrastructure guy's advantage Wes and GM were on the point that writing code faster doesn't make verification any less important, and if you're not careful, verification is where the money goes. @thisisgm does a lot of adversarial review, throwing diffs into separate code reviewers so one session doesn't "loop around in useless workflows." Everybody in that room has watched an agent chase its own tail. I pushed back on one thing. Wes had said it might take a real programmer just as long to write something themselves as to have AI do it. I agree, for programmers. I'm not one. I do enterprise storage for a living. Yawn, I know. I know what good looks like when I see it, but I couldn't sit down in an IDE and start writing Java. For people like me, AI didn't make coding a little faster. It made it possible. Wes's take: infrastructure and DevOps people have more agency here than programmers, because we're used to making things work at the edge. That part of the job didn't get compressed. The typing did. GM said it for all of us: "Contrary to popular belief, I am an infrastructure guy. This would not have happened if it's not for AI." OmaStorm: a radar app built over a long weekend Labor Day weekend. A new model drop and Fable 5.1 landed right as Omarchy was taking off. Wes stood Omarchy up in a VM, fell for how configurable it was, and asked himself what he uses every day. Weather radar. He's been hooked on weather since Hurricane Andrew. First question was data, because "if you don't have the data, it's just a toy." He assumed a commercial license was coming. It wasn't. In the US, every NEXRAD radar reading gets published to a public S3 bucket. Free, no license. So he pointed Fable at the bucket, asked how to render it fast, and asked for it to look 8-bit and pixelated instead of the smoothed-over radar every phone app shows. The architecture decision is the interesting part. Omarchy plugins aren't compiled. Whatever's on main gets pulled down and run, interpreted, on install. Great for iteration, terrible for a rendering engine. So Wes split it: the plugin is the "dumb terminal," and a headless daemon does the work and talks to it over a socket. First try in Python, too slow, torn down. Second try in Rust, a language he didn't know, picked because the problem was bounded (same data in, PNG tiles out) and memory management mattered. First time it rendered he couldn't believe it worked. He tweeted it. It's around 100 stars now with a steady stream of contributors, several of them on the call. His line on the whole thing: "It reminds you of what's good in the world. Building cool software is something we can all hopefully agree on." One thing he's too polite to say. Last week Larry chased a stall in OmaStorm's live poller at volume rollovers all the way upstream into the NEXRAD parsing library it depends on. It wasn't OmaStorm's bug. That's what "swarm to lift the maintainers" looks like in practice. @gh_TechLuddite : three years fighting AI, five months building with it He's worked since he was 12. He's 42. Thirteen years at an MSP, with a CTO he calls the best leader he's ever had. For the last three years his job, in his words, was to be "a meat proxy for safety and data governance." You can't let a tool like this run wild among people who don't understand the blast radius. Then his CTO gave him a reality check: it's time. He's been learning in earnest since May. His warning comes from somebody who does vendor qualification for a living. He's watching companies switch vendors because the vendor's AI implementation doesn't meet basic security standards. He brought up the McDonald's data leak as a system that didn't need to be engineered the way it was. And he said, flat out, that when these LLMs land inside MSP and enterprise management tools, "the IT AI apocalypse is inbound." His first learning project was building an AI to play an AI in Universal Paperclips. Not a joke. He wanted fast discernment in a system with no API, then action in another gated system, which is a real shape of problem. I asked how he found the holes in Blip. He wanted to use it, forked it, and ran his agents across the fork for safety, "because I'm freaking paranoid." Then he couldn't help sharing what he found. And he added the thing that stuck with me: I was the first person who responded to him at all and welcomed his additions. That's why he's here. That's why any of us are here. @thetundeo found Omarchy by accident, watching a review of a 5K monitor he was shopping for. The reviewer was running Omarchy. He didn't connect it to @DHH, whose products he'd been using for a year and a half, until later. He handed his MacBook Pro to his daughter for uni, bought a Dell XPS 14, and installed Omarchy. His CTO and two developers are on XPS 16s. Only the designer is still on a Mac, and if 37signals ships a creative suite, the designer converts too. DHH asked for meetup volunteers. Tundy put his hand up without thinking. First Omarchy London meetup is September 24 and it has 70 signups. He also had an obscure streaming webcam with no config software on Linux. Built the config tool in two days. Once it's tidy, it goes public. @joelga from the Omarchy Guild, because Discord is a mess @joelga was already building http://railsguild.com, a verified portfolio site for Rails devs. When the Omarchy wave hit, he cloned the idea and built http://omarchyguild.com in a couple of days. Sign in with GitHub, it pulls your repos in. There's a leaderboard. The motivation was blunt and everybody agreed: the Omarchy Discord is huge, vast, and impossible to find anything in. Wes: "Maybe we're getting old." The Guild repo is private right now. Joel will open it if there's enough interest, with the honest caveat that opening a repo creates work. What do we call ourselves? Joel told me anybody who's seen my output would say I'm a programmer, whatever I call myself. I said what I always say: I give Larry an idea and he comes back close to done. It's my ideas, not my coding. Tech Luddite had been wrestling with exactly this. He doesn't feel like a coder. Where he landed, the night before the Space: what he actually had to learn in the last five months wasn't AI, it was software development. So he's a software developer now. Not a coder, not a programmer. Joel offered a second frame: mid-level manager. "Hey agent, go build this," then making sure your little sibling did what you asked. Tech Luddite had tried on orchestrator and coordinator and rejected both, because they leave out that it was your idea and you drove it the whole way. And it's more than vibe coding when you're dedicated to it, fighting confabulation, insisting on accuracy. Wes's answer covers all of it: the definition's changing, and what it comes down to is, can you verify it, and do you have boundaries. Amalgamafi thesis: small local models are the new app store For Omarchy to win for real, we need small local models trained on everything the community is learning by using Omarchy. Most of your token spend right now is the agent rediscovering your machine. That should be local, in a model you download like any app and plug into your main agent. And the bigger idea: this is the new app store, and it's open source. A sub-gigabyte model that already knows plumbing, on a hundred-dollar computer, already wired into the Omarchy environment. His proof of concept: he told an agent to grab Chromium, rip it apart, and run models in Wasm inside the browser. Fed it a video stream and got an hour of transcription back in about twenty minutes, locally. My answer was two numbers and a claim. Right now about 8% of my prompts go to my local machine. I think that's 50% by this time next year, and the gains come from quantization and open source software, not hardware. And the people you'd hope are thinking about a model trained directly on Omarchy: I can confirm they are. That might be one of the big announcements. I said "maybe." I meant it. Wes summed it up: "The cavalry ain't coming. We're in." I commented...."the people who put $15 million into Omarchy didn't put it in to get where we are now. We're 10% into this. In a year we'll say "I can't remember before Omarchy" the way we say "I can't remember before AI." @gh_TechLuddite 's counter: Opinionated Omarchy He hears "train a model" a lot and isn't a fan. His project is Opinionated Omarchy. The idea: AI fixes for Omarchy should be consistent and cheap, for every user, everywhere, without a cloud. Can a model do that? Yes. But training one is expensive to build, expensive to iterate, and hard to peer into when it's wrong. His experience with quantized local models in production roles is that they break things. He's had a local model running shell commands go sideways and had to bring in a frontier model to repair the session. So nothing local runs in a production role for him. What he's betting on instead: skills and a tight troubleshooting corpus. Skills cost more input tokens, which are cheap, and produce fewer and better output tokens, which are expensive. "What's the point of saving input tokens if it gets you output you can't use?" Opinionated Omarchy today is a troubleshooting corpus with a GitHub Pages front end. Next stage: a skill plus a SQLite database so it can be searched to shape the input before the model ever sees it. MIT, run it locally. His own agents called the repo "the most documented empty folder in all of GitHub." He asked, in plain words, for help. He's also got Omarchy Fleet, built on the Omarchy Kids work. "Business by repo": a pizza shop is a repo, combine it with Fleet, and you stand up their machines from it. Apple Silicon, AMD, and big iron @Wappy_x asked when M4 support lands. Wes: M1 and M2 are the current focus, M3 and up come next, and it won't be in the upcoming 4.5 release. Omarchy Mac lives in a fork today, and every bug fixed in one place has to be ported to the other. Getting it back into the main repo is "stop the bleeding first," then things accelerate. Help is welcome. @MuchmoreIT came in from the other end. AMD only, testing Omarchy across Radeon boxes because that's what he builds at scale: EPYC, NVL72 racks. He installs Google TPU systems on-prem at tier0 companies, the BIG ONES. His contribution is going to be stretching Omarchy onto bigger and bigger systems, the way CIQ did with Rocky Linux. Omarchy linux? @dhh y'all need to connect. Known Heath for over 20yrs and I'll say what he won't, he's the real deal. Heath also wants to collaborate with Wes on NOAA and he wrote a hurricane model against the same NEXRAD data OmaStorm reads. Building in the open, and building together Wes made the case for building in the open. It takes vulnerability. But people learn, you learn, and the community gets lifted. His ask: if anybody's drowning in PRs, let's swarm and help. @gh_TechLuddite 's reply was the most quoted thing on the call. He started building in the open five months ago and it got lonely, more lonely than building privately. What changed it was finding a community to build with. "Build in the open, but find ways to build together." He also gave the maintainer's side: when you send someone a PR, you're asking them to support your code. He's got things he wants to throw at Infomarchy that he won't, because he doesn't want me carrying that burden. That kind of restraint is rare. I said the obvious thing people avoid: you don't have to accept every PR. It's your baby. Be firm and nice. "I appreciate what you did, but I'm going a different direction." Somebody sent Blip a full Apple Contacts integration, and the right answer for Contacts is http://icloud.com/contact installed as a web app. I felt terrible saying no. I still had to. @ncfrontiersman went further. Code generation is the easy part now; the approach is the hard part. Open an issue first, agree on the approach, then write the PR. Otherwise somebody burns their tokens building German radar for OmaStorm and the data license doesn't allow it. He's thinking about gating PRs behind approved issues. @joelga proposed the thing I think happens next: a shared contributor instruction set any of us can drop into a project. When a contributor's agent reads the repo, it's primed to help the way that maintainer wants. Tech Luddite added: PRs have a draft status. Use it for discussion. And like I said on air, it's a pull request. Request is implied. Blip, Claude on Mac, and what I've learned about memory Before Omarchy, I had Larry on an M4 Mac and asked it to go look at what it could see inside the Apple ecosystem. Turns out the iMessage database isn't encrypted. It's wide open. That became a repo called Claude on Mac. It gives Claude Code or Codex the ability to read and write Apple Mail, Notes, Photos, Messages, all of it. First thing I did was have Larry read every message my brother and I ever sent each other and summarize the relationship. It came back with "you send 58% of the text, he responds, you respond faster." It can send on your behalf. I locked that down to ask every single time, and it's never burned me. When I moved to Omarchy, the first idea was to proxy to the Mac over SSH. Then: why not a plugin? Version 0.0 was "show me my iMessages, quick and dirty." Then make it look like Messages. Then I got greedy: photos, contacts, send and receive. The setup is a Mac on your desk with SSH open (Amphetamine keeps it awake), Tailscale so you can be anywhere (if you don't use Tailscale, shame on you, go get it), and the plugin pulling from the Mac directly. Twelve contributors now. Folks like @gh_TechLuddite got in there and showed me I had security problems. They were right. How I run it today: Larry Prime on my Omarchy box keeps up with the PRs, merges the easy ones, and for anything that needs a decision it prompts me with a pick-list and a recommendation. If you use Claude Code, bang its head into the ground until it always uses AskUserQuestion with recommendations. Nobody wants "here are the twelve things I need you to answer." I started building Larry about 3 days after Claude Code came out, out of frustration at re-explaining everything every session. Each piece I built showed up in Claude Code native about a month later. Not because anybody saw my code. I'm nobody. But it told me I was on the right track. And here's what I've learned from pointing Larry at every new memory system that drops and telling it to cherry-pick whatever makes it better: every memory system saves everything. Memory isn't the problem. Recall of the right thing at the right moment is the problem, and nobody's solved it. PART TWO: THE QUESTIONS STILL UNANSWERED Every one of these came up on the call. None got resolved. Some of them nobody even owns yet. Q1. Who owns the contribution protocol? Every maintainer is getting five PRs that do the same thing five different ways, PRs for features they don't want, PRs written by agents whose owners never read them. Wes wants issue-first gating. Joel wants a shared CONTRIBUTING framework that primes the contributor's agent. Tech Luddite wants a skill for making PRs on other people's repos. I want the "no" to be easier to say. These are all the same document, and nobody's written it. What's the minimum a repo needs so an agent reading it behaves? Who maintains the shared version? Can the gate be automated without killing the drive-by fix that actually helps? Q2. Local models: train, or retrieve? Amogama wants small models trained on Omarchy, distributed like apps. Tech Luddite has watched local models break machines and is betting on a curated corpus plus skills plus a SQLite index. I said 8% of my prompts are local today and 50% in a year. Nobody knows which approach produces consistent, cheap, correct fixes on a stranger's machine, because nobody's measured it. Who curates the corpus? Where's the line between what a local model may do (read, diagnose, propose) and what needs a frontier model or a human (run the shell command)? If DHH's team ships an official Omarchy model, do community efforts complement it, compete, or fold in? How do you test a local fix without a fleet of VMs? Q3. Recall, not memory. Every agent memory system saves everything. None reliably surface the right thing at the right moment. Every person on that call re-explained something to their agent this week that it already knew. Is this a per-person tooling problem or a community one? Could the Opinionated Omarchy corpus be the shared recall layer for Omarchy problems, with personal memory on top? "Did the agent already know this" is measurable. Nobody's measuring it. Q4. Install and distribution. Plugins run whatever's on main, interpreted. That's why they're easy to build. OmaStorm needed a Rust daemon for performance. How does a compiled backend get built, shipped, and updated through a system that only pulls QML from main? Blip's best install path is "point your AI at the repo." That's not an installer. Forking is the community's default move and system updates break forks. There's no versioning, pinning, or rollback story most users understand. Q5. Security and blast radius. Who reviews plugins before people install them? Right now the answer is "Tech Luddite forks it and runs his agents across it." That doesn't scale. What's the norm for agents with send or write capability? Ask every time is best effort. Allowlists are better. Nothing is standard. When agents with shell access run local models that break things, who's accountable? And Tech Luddite's MSP view: vendors are already failing security qualification on AI integrations. When LLMs land in enterprise management tools, the blast radius is every managed endpoint. Should Omarchy, as a community, be saying something about that now? Q6. Discovery and duplication. Discord is unusable for finding things. The Guild is one answer. Plugin catalogs are another. Neither stops five people building the same plugin and never finding each other. Fork or abandon? Forking grows the ecosystem and fragments it. Who says "this already exists, go contribute there" before somebody burns a weekend? Q7. Desktop or platform? Wappy wants it on an M4. Heath wants it on TPU racks. Tech Luddite wants to roll it out to a pizza shop from a repo. Nobody publishes a supported hardware matrix. Is there an Omarchy server, or is that rumor? Business fleets are a different support burden from enthusiast laptops, and Omarchy Kids and Omarchy Fleet are each one person. Q8. What do we call ourselves? Developer, coder, programmer, orchestrator, mid-level manager, vibe coder. It sounds like vocabulary. It isn't. It decides who feels allowed to say "I built this" and who gets taken seriously when they file a bug. Tech Luddite's answer, "software developer, because that's what I actually had to learn," is the best one I've heard. Nobody's adopted it. Q9. Data rights and regional reach. OmaStorm works because US NEXRAD data is free. Somebody will send a PR for German radar and Wes may not be legally allowed to merge it. Blip works because the Mac's iMessage database is readable. Apple could close that tomorrow. Which of our plugins depend on access that could disappear or doesn't exist outside the US? Q10. Maintainer loneliness and burnout. Building in the open got lonely for Tech Luddite. Wes can't keep up. Joel isn't sure he wants the work of going public. I've got twelve contributors on Blip and an agent doing triage because I can't. "Swarm to help" got proposed. Nobody defined how you ask for the swarm or who answers. Who backs up a maintainer who goes quiet for a month? Q11. The platform we're meeting on. X dropped a room of 56 people. The chat couldn't be opened. Speakers couldn't unmute. This is our community infrastructure right now. Is X Spaces the venue, or the discovery layer for a venue? Where do the recordings and summaries live so they're searchable? Q12. Not your grandfather's Linux. Zoom all the way out on what DHH is doing and the goal is that Omarchy stops being for developers. Every single person on that call was a developer of some kind. What's the first non-developer use case that actually ships, and who's building it? Meetups are the first thing pulling in people who don't live on GitHub. What do we do with them when they show up? ASKS ON THE TABLE Tech Luddite wants help on Opinionated Omarchy: skills, SQLite-backed corpus search, anything past skills. MIT, run it locally, "I would love anyone to even just talk." JoelGA will open the Omarchy Guild repo if enough people say they want to contribute. Say it. I want a real next-next-next installer for Blip. Point your agent at the repo, then come find me. Wes and the Omarchy Mac effort want help getting the Mac fork back into the main repo, then M3 and up. Tundy has 70 people coming to London on September 24. Heath and Wes are talking NEXRAD and hurricane models offline. If you've got weather data chops, that thread wants you. Everybody: follow everybody who was in the room. We're small. We've got the same likes. NEXT EPISODE: Weekly, probably. Same format: raise your hand, tell us what you're building, tell us where you're stuck. Don't be scared. If you don't know what you're doing, ask somebody, or ask your AI agent. Ping me! I want to help. No politics, no ego. This is about Omarchy and nothing else. If you were in the room, you've got the same likes as the rest of us. Follow everybody. "The cavalry ain't coming. We're it" - @ncfrontiersman SEE YOU NEXT SUNDAY! ## Transcript Machine generated. Speaker labels come from the transcription tool and are reused for different people; the summary says who is who. Speaker 1: I'm thinking about, like, yeah, we can write code faster, but that verification process is still so important because you're not... you're never really going to know if it's going to work like you think until you're actually exercising the binaries, the executables, you know? Speaker 2: Yeah, and if you're not careful, it can get extremely expensive. Speaker 1: Oh, totally. Speaker 2: Like, I run testing on subscriptions, and I ideally like as much manual work as you can do you try to do, but at the end of the day you're tackling a bunch of different issues at the same time, and it's like, the machine is going to do a better job regardless. You, as the human, have to, like, actually make sure it's doing the right things and verify as much as you can. Speaker 1: Yep, totally. Totally. Well, let's pause for a sec. Nix, did you get connected? Fred Nix: Hey, man. I think I'm on. Speaker 1: All right. Awesome. So, uh, GM was just telling us... I mean, I don't know what you heard, but kind of what it's been like with Flea and how it kind of just exploded overnight and... Fred Nix: Well deserved. Speaker 1: He's trying... yeah. Fred Nix: Hey, I want to comment on, uh, you know, earlier you said you think it might take just as long to code it yourself, and I agree with that. Um, however, I'm an infrastructure guy by trade. I do enterprise class, uh, storage systems. Uh, yawn. I can feel everybody yawning from here. Um, but what... AI might take you guys that are programmers just as long, but for me, I could code, but it might take me 10 times longer than somebody that knows what the hell they're doing. So for me, it opens up an ability to do something that was out of reach for me. I know what good looks like when I see it, but I don't... I couldn't just, like, start out and write Java code, you know, inside an IDE. Um, so, you know, for some of us that are technical... I'd call myself technical, but certainly not programmers... you know, it reaches down and allows us to create things, you know, as long as we can explain it well and we know what good looks like. Speaker 1: Yeah. 100%. Yeah, it's, uh, it... yeah, I mean, and I think, if anything, infrastructure folks, DevOps folks, you guys have a lot more agency in some ways than programmers because you're used to making the shit work, like wiring it up, you know? Fred Nix: Exactly. Speaker 1: At the edge, dealing with all the issues, and, uh, you know, for us that are, you know, we're programmers or whatever you want to say, like, that kind of has been compressed now. Fred Nix: Yeah. Speaker 1: And it's like, now, you know, we're solving that stuff too, but now it's like we also, you know, we're having to make sure it works, so. Fred Nix: I also might say that it helps infrastructure people. It's given us a bigger boost than programmers. Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, some, for sure, yeah. And there's all kinds of programmers, you know? There's some people that just write the code, there's some people that, uh, are, you know, all about crafting the perfect, you know, clean functions and all that, and no shame to that, no shade to that, but. Fred Nix: Yeah, and, you know, the... not all the PRs I've received, you know, we wouldn't be... I wouldn't be where I am or Blip or any of the rest of them. Um, if anybody that's listening wants to speak, please raise your hand and let's, um, let's get folks involved. I'm the co-host, I don't want to... excuse me... step on you ass, but. Speaker 1: No, no, sounds good. Yeah, uh, real quick, though, GM, anything else you wanted to share? Um, I appreciate you coming in. I thought you said you had work today or something, so I appreciate you jumping in. Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, contrary to popular belief, I am an infrastructure guy. Speaker 1: Awesome. Speaker 2: So I'm not as skilled when it comes to the UI and front-end stuff, so AI helps a lot, for sure. Like, this would not have happened if it's not for AI. And, yeah, uh, I have a bunch of processes that I do a lot of adversarial reviews with AI. Like, I just throw the diff into code reviewers, and that does wonders for my workflow because sessions can get caught up in context if you're not careful, and it's going to loop around in useless workflows. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: And, yeah, I mean, like, to summarize, yeah, Flea is a work in progress. I am grateful, uh, beyond words, for all the support it's been getting from all of you guys around the world, and, yeah, I'm going to keep working on it and hopefully things happen. Speaker 1: Wonderful. Fred Nix: Just for, uh, housekeeping, I would like to let everybody know this is being recorded. There will be summaries put back out later. Um, if you don't want to be recorded, don't speak. If you'd like to speak, raise your hand. Speaker 1: All right. Well, um, awesome. So let's see. Anybody else, um, have something cool they're building you want to talk about? Let's see. Um, trying to see who all's in here. We've got some folks. Um, I mean, I can... I can take a moment if no one's got anything right off the top of their head. I can talk a little bit about Oma Storm and how that... Fred Nix: I'd love to hear about that. Oh, I'd love to. Speaker 1: Yeah. Fred Nix: How did it... you know, let me ask you a few questions. So how did the idea come to you? When was it that you went, "You know what, I'm going to build it"? Did you kind of, like, start making something just for yourself and then go, "You know what, I think other people would want this"? And I've seen your work, Wes, and, you know, basically in my mind, if you're interested in it, I think a lot of folks are going to be interested in it. So, you know, tell us the origin story and all the places you went with it and... Speaker 1: Yeah. Uh, it was interesting. So Labor Day weekend, you get a long weekend, right? New model comes out, Astra comes out, um, you know, we had Fable 5.1 out, and I... and at the same time, Omachi is just really taking off, and I'm like, "All right, I don't want to... " so I got it installed on a VM, uh, to begin with, and started playing with it, and I'm like, "I love this. I love I can configure things. I love how easy it is to, uh, spin up stuff," and I'm like, "I think I'm going to build a plugin. I wonder, you know," and so I started thinking, um, what would I like to see? What do I use the most? And it's... I've loved Wether. I've loved Wether since Hurricane Andrew years ago. Uh, been following it, um, and, you know, something that I do pretty much every day is open up the radar app on my phone, and I'm like, "All right, where are the storms coming from? Where are we tracking?" I'm like, "Man, I bet I could make a sick radar app on Omachi that... " and I'm going to say Omachi, so y'all just have to be okay with that, but, uh, a sick radar app, and, uh, it's like, I want it to, you know, I gave... I started out with Fable, and I'm like, "All right, I want it to look like it was built in, you know, just like the other plugins: network, um, the agents plugin, like, just native to how it is," um, and I said, "You know, let's talk about where we can get this data from. We can start from the US," because, you know, it always starts with, "You could build cool, you know, apps and plugins, but if you don't have the good data, you know, the access to it, then it's just a toy," and so my first thought was like, "Well, dang, I bet I have to pay for some, you know, commercial license and all that," so I did some research, and it turns out, at least for the US, they put up all of the records, the readings from these radars that are, you know, they put up all of the records, the readings from these radars that are, you know, uh, reading this information up on an Amazon, like, S3 bucket that's publicly available for free to download and anybody can use, and so I was like, "All right, Fable, go take a look at that data. Think about how we could, in the most performant way, have a plugin that shows the radar, uh, for a given location," um, and I want it to render it, and it should look like 8-bit, pixelized, you know, not the traditional, like, smooth over radar that you see in some apps because it's just like, "Hey, that'd be cool," right? And so I started doing some mockups with it, um, not, like, just HTML mockups, and I got to design a light, and then I said, "All right, let's think about this. Let's split it up," and, um, because of the way the Omachi plugins work, it's kind of like whatever you push to main, um, when somebody, like, up on GitHub, when somebody goes to install it, it pulls main down and runs it, and it's not a compiled thing. It's not like you're compiling, uh, the Qt code. Like, it just runs, like, interpreted, and so I'm like, "That might be a little slow for, like, a rendering engine," so, you know, what can we do to have the plugin be the view, the dumb terminal, you know, like we used to say, and then the backend kind of run like it's this headless daimon, or demon, or however you say it, that, um, could then talk to it over a socket connection? And so I started riffing with, uh, with Fable, and it's like, "All right, I can do something," and it started with Python, and I'm like, "No, that's not going to cut it. That's going to be too slow," so I had to tear that down, and I said, "All right, I don't really know Rust. I know, you know, I've got experience with others, like Golang and all the front-end, you know, JavaScript, TypeScript, I know Ruby, but as far as, like, you know, really fast, you know, I've heard the memory management in Rust is great, and, uh, you know, slow to compile, the syntax is a little hard to follow," so I'm like, "All right, this sounds like a good use case. Uh, for something that's bounded, you know, it's going to always take this type of data in, and I want it to generate, you know, an output of PNG images that then the plugin can just lay on top of a map, a control," and so it got to the point where it started rendering, and that first time I saw it, I'm like, "Oh my God, I can't believe this works. Like, this is so cool," and so I think I shared, like, a tweet of, like, you know, "This is something I'm building. What do you guys think?" and, you know, everybody was like, "Wow, this looks incredible," and I was actually kind of surprised how, like, much people liked it. You know, I didn't know a lot of people like Wether or not. Maybe that's a little bit of a niche thing, but, um, yeah, so I started getting out, and then it was like, "How can I, you know, release this to people so they can test it? What's involved with that?" and, uh, pushed it up, and, uh, people started downloading it, and, you know, I think Omach has 100 GitHub stars now. Fred Nix: Wow. Speaker 1: I've had so many people contribute, um, people on this call, I'm sure, and, uh, it's just been fun. I did open source years ago, took a break for a while, and it's just been so good to be back. Fred Nix: Awesome. Speaker 1: Doing it again, um, because it's like this... it's like when we build as a community, um, it reminds you of what's good in the world, you know? We all get caught up in politics and everything else going on, but, you know, building cool software, you know, that's something that we can all hopefully agree on, so, um, yeah. Fred Nix: That's awesome, man. Where do you see it going? Like, what's on your roadmap? Speaker 1: All right. I don't know if we lost Nix or not. Fred Nix: It muted me when you started talking. So what on your roadmap can you share? Speaker 1: Cool. Well, that's enough of me talking for a while. Let's see. Anybody else, uh, have something they want to chat about? Any questions or? Fred Nix: Can you not hear me? Speaker 4: Yeah, check, check. Can you hear me all right? Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, man. Speaker 4: Yeah, awesome. I, uh, I found you through Oma Storm, and I installed that right away when I saw it. The vibe is real. And Wether, I don't think it is a niche thing. I think that's a universal thing, right? Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 4: It doesn't matter where you are in the world. It touches you, and it's something that belongs in the operating system, and we've seen how that's happened with other operating systems. I mean, Windows tried that stuff, but Oma Storm's awesome, and I think that that captures a lot of. Speaker 1: I think... did it cut out? Fred Nix: Can you unmute me, maybe? Speaker 1: Let's see. Speaker 4: Maybe he was hit by a storm. Speaker 1: Yeah, maybe so. All good. All good. Um, we'll catch up with him in a minute when he comes back. Uh, let's see. Anybody else building anything cool? Doesn't have to be a big deal. It could be small. It could be a theme, you know, figure out how to set up something. Speaker 4: Just, um, yeah, prevent us from doing that stuff. There's great hardware that is locked up, and to be able to break those walls and access that hardware with open-source software is the coolest thing to me, so I'd love to hear Nix talk about that a little bit and hear about some other things people are working on in that vein because that's what really gets me going. Fred Nix: Hey, I'm back. I just restarted. Something muted me, and the button wouldn't unmute. Sorry about that. I believe your question is a bridge away from, like, Microsoft and Apple? Is that what you want to know about? Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, that's just what gets me fired up, is breaking the walled gardens and allowing open-source software like, like, Omachi. Fred Nix: Yeah. Speaker 4: And Linux and whatever to run on Apple hardware and whatever hardware. Phones even. It's coming. Fred Nix: Yeah. If you look at what DHH is really trying to do, and you upclick the highest level, um, Omachi, it really... we've got to get to the point where it's not for developers anymore, you know, it's not your grandfather's Linux, if you're old enough to know what that means. Um, so when I started Omachi, uh, you know, I struggled with the keyboard as well, but I knew that there was something different about it, and so I think I alluded to Wes as like, "How did you get started building it? Was it just for you?" and Blip, turned out, for me, was one of the earlier things that I started tinkering with, and, you know, again, I think I've said it enough. I'm not a programmer, so, you know, I just started talking to Fable and saying, "Hey, here's what I'd like to do," and my first instance, you know, I was shooting low, and I just said, "Is there any way that you could just make, you know, if I get a message, you know, from, um, from my message, is there any way we can bring that on?" and, um, and I'll mention things here, and please don't think I have an ego about it. Um, I don't like talking about myself, uh, but the story includes it. So I've been using and building what I call Larry on, uh, Claude Code since about three days after it started, and I didn't understand exactly what it was, and I had frustrations, and I started, you know, couldn't remember crap, and so I started down, you know, what thousands of people did was, you know, "How can I make this thing, you know, how do I get to the point where when I start a session, I don't have to tell it everything fucking again?" Um, and over time, the interesting thing was that each of the pieces that I built for Larry, um, Anthropic started, and it wasn't... certainly wasn't because they saw my code. I'm a nobody. Anthropic started building these pieces into it, and so each time I'd make something custom for Larry, about a month later, it would show up in Claude Code, um, which, again, they didn't see my stuff, but what it did do is tell me that I was on the right track, um, and there's lots of folks that have better memory systems out there, but Larry, for me, is so customized now, um, when I do see a good memory system, and I have no shame in this, uh, even just last night, I saw a new, good memory system, and I wish I could repeat the name of it, but I don't remember. Um, I believe I retweeted it, and what I do is I point Larry at the repo and, um, unabashedly just say, "Hey, go check this repo out and see if there's anything we can cherry-pick to make your memory better," and what I've found, and it's really started to hit home in the past three months, is that everybody's memory system that they do, and I'm assuming everybody knows what I mean about memory, is just, you know, not having to explain it over and over and, you know, telling it to take the fucking em dashes out, you know, they drive me crazy, um, and over time, Larry, you know, started understanding what I wanted and what I was trying to do, so new memory systems come out, I point those people's repo and say, you know, um, without any sense of shame, "Go pull out the pieces that'll make yourself better," and what I've learned in the last three or four months is that pretty much anybody's and everybody's memory systems that they're using for codecs, for, um, uh, for Claude Code, and the one that I really built mine off of was a guy by the name of Daniel Miesler, and I'm probably killing his last name, but you should look him up. He has a thing called LifeOS, I believe it's ourlifeOS.com, and I've long since left his code behind, but he was kind of the guy that got me started. Um, I'll leave comments for him on the table. Um, good dude. Um, anyway, what I learned in the last three months is that everybody's memory system pretty much has 100% memory save rate. All the memory systems save everything. Memory is not the problem. Recall of the right data at the right time and the right situation is the hard part. So fast forward, and let me know if I'm getting too long. I'm happy to shut up. So I got onto Omachi. I'll back up a little bit. So when I was coding for Larry, it was on a Mac, just a little M4 Mac, and I started tinkering around and asked Larry to go look into the, uh, Apple ecosystem and what it could, you know, where it could see into, and come to find out that iMessage database is not encrypted. It's pretty wide open, um, and so over time, I've got a repo out there called Claude on Mac, um, and you can go grab that, and what that did... this was before Omachi... and what it literally does, and you can install it, it's fairly well tested and used by a couple of folks, maybe a dozen. What it does is it unlocks your Claude or your codecs to reach into your Apple Mail, your Apple Notes, your Apple Photos, your Apple everything. Um, so it has the ability to make modifications and do those things, and so as I tightened that up, iMessage became one of them. Now, I didn't... I stayed inside the Claude Code CLI interface, so for me, Larry was just able to, um, go read my iMessages and, um, you know, what I did early was just say, "Hey, go read my 1,500 messages," because I never deleted an iMessage, "Go read all my messages back from my brother on iMessage and, you know, summarize our relationship," and, like, it would go down and do details like you send 58% of the text, he responds, you respond quicker, you know, give me all kinds of data. Um, it can send on your behalf, um, but I locked it the hell down. Hey, Sir Jill, thank you for joining. Uh, X just dropped us. We're hoping to get everybody back in. Give me a thumbs up if you can hear me, sir. It'd be helpful. Oh, man, we had 56 folks on and it died. Hey, thank you, Sir Jill. Appreciate that. Hey, we're going to get started here in just a few minutes. I'm waiting on Wes to rejoin. Uh, X just dropped the session, sess the, uh, X system, so sorry about that. Hopefully, we can rebuild some momentum. Hey, Wes, go ahead and request being a host. Hey, can you hear me, guys? Speaker 2: Yeah. I, I, uh, actually shared another one. I think people are maybe over in that one. Fred Nix: All righty. Well, where's the... where's the net? Speaker 2: Where should we go? Fred Nix: We'll join. Speaker 2: Uh, let's stay here. This is fine. Fred Nix: You want to tell them to rejoin? Nick's read? Speaker 2: Yeah. Fred Nix: I, uh, actually shared another one. I think people are maybe. Speaker 2: Oh, weird. That was me. Speaker 4: Like my dad. Fred Nix: Just end it, Wes, and or tell people to come over here and end it. Speaker 2: Okay. One second. Fred Nix: Yep. Hey, 1280. Um, I know we had plans to do some other stuff, and I know I got to this before I got to you, and I want to publicly let you know that, uh, I meant no disrespect. Uh, we will get to it. Speaker 4: Thanks, brother. Don't feel bad. Uh, part of it's my schedule. I got a lot going on. I got two kids and running a small company, you know, it's. Fred Nix: Yeah, man. I understand. Speaker 4: It's all right. We'll link up. You know, there's always so much going on. Fred Nix: Right. Speaker 4: That I think it's kind of fine. It doesn't even matter when we talk, because whenever we talk, there's going to be some groundbreaking stuff going on. It's going to be a crazy week, I'm sure. Fred Nix: Absolutely. Well, you know, I study human behavior, and the most powerful negative human emotion is being left out, and I don't want you to feel like that, and I did not want you to think I was skipping over you or for some reason. Anyway, hey, um, Tech Luddite, I'm so glad you're here. Uh, would you request to speak? I'd love to chat with you and hear more about you, sir. Here, I'll just throw you... if you want to. Um, if you don't want to speak, just deny the invite. It's all good. Um, where were we? Um, should we keep going or? Speaker 2: Yeah. I was trying to cancel the other one. There's no way to do it. Like, I don't. Fred Nix: Just end it at the top, right? Speaker 2: Uh, well, I have to go out of this to do that, so I'm trying to do it on my laptop. Fred Nix: Um, you know what I would do? What would help me is just close your browser and just rejoin us. It'll actually put you back as speaker automatically. Speaker 2: Okay. All right. One minute. Fred Nix: Be back. Hey, 180. I appreciate... or 1280. I appreciate you, uh, talking to my other buddies, um, that I introduced you guys to. Uh, that's really cool. Tundy. My man, Tundy joined. Oh, he disappeared. Hey, everybody, I really would encourage everybody to follow around each other. Um, we're a pretty small community. Um, you know, we don't do politics. We don't do ego. So, you know, just hover over everybody and follow everybody, and if you join this session, um, I'm following you for sure, and if I miss anybody, please poke me and let me know. Um, I don't give a shit about ratios and all that. There's Tech Luddite. Hey, man. I really appreciate all the work that you've done on the PRs and helping me out. I'd love to hear your story and, uh, how did you find all my bugs that I... they're like, how did you do it, man? You're amazing. Oh, we can't hear you, Tech. Speaker 2: Yeah, I was just reaching for that, uh, mute button, hoping my Omachi hotkeys would hold up. Uh, here I am. Am I coming through okay now? Fred Nix: You're good, man. You sound great. Speaker 2: Excellent. I think this might be the first time I've spoken to anyone through this laptop. Uh, my, uh, my wife got it for me, uh, for a birthday present just before that, uh, vacation, which led me to find your software. To answer your question, I was, uh, just going wild with this laptop on vacation. Fred Nix: Nice. Speaker 2: Like, uh, like a typical bad tech dad. Fred Nix: Yeah. Speaker 2: Uh, but I did minimize it, and, uh, and your software really helped me through that, because trying to put a little bit of time in a lot of things. Fred Nix: Our software. Speaker 2: Yeah. Uh, I'm at a loss for words, honestly, and to respond to that here with others is, uh, is a lot, because you're the first person that I think responded to me at all, and you welcomed my additions, and it's hard for me to even articulate how much it means to me, so thank you. Fred Nix: You bet, man. Speaker 2: And, uh, yeah, so, uh, you asked my story. I have a tendency to burn time, and I know we don't have a lot of it, so I'm going to condense it to, like, four sentences, if I can even do that, but, you know, if I had more time, I'd write a shorter letter. Speaker 4: Wait. Let me stop you. We got all the time in the world. You know what I mean? Like. Speaker 2: Not this kind of time, uh, but, uh, yeah. Speaker 4: You're saying. Speaker 2: We all have long stories too, so I would more than as much as I love to rant, uh, and let me tell you, my coworkers, um, suffer it, um, I would love to hear a little bit about a lot of you, and so I'll try to make mine short, and if anyone gets on a roll, I'd love to hear it all too, but please, uh, I take no offense to me being stopped, and especially no offense to being corrected. Like. Fred Nix: I'd rather be corrected than wrong. Speaker 2: You know, I'm giving people classes left and right and then having multiple AI, uh, systems audit my own speech and bring it back to me so we can reiterate on it. Fred Nix: Right. Speaker 2: Because there's a lot of people need to learn so much, and it needs to be taught in a, in the right way. Fred Nix: Hey, if anybody out there knows how to open up the chat space, can somebody type something into the chat space to get the chats running so we can drop links in here? I can't find it. And also, we have a very special guest from the UK, somebody I really want to talk to. Uh, I may murder his name, and I'm not even going to try the last name. Tundy, you know it's you. Would you request to talk? And, uh, if you don't mind, if you don't want to talk, I get it, um, but I'd love to speak with you, man. Anybody else that wants to speak? Hold on. I'll get it. I'll invite you. There you go, Tundy. Um, let me finish up my rant, and I'll keep it a lot shorter on how Blipp got there and get my crap out of the way before a bunch of people join so we can talk about more important stuff. The bottom line is, um, I don't know if you heard the last, but Claude, I built Larry. Larry, uh, before Omachi came out, I, uh, I really wanted to integrate the Apple, um, infrastructure with notes and photos. I didn't have a UI. I just gave Larry the ability to go look at all my Apple information. He could write Apple notes. He could send iMessages, but I locked him down where he has to request every single time to do it. Now, I know that's just best effort. He never burned me and sent iMessages. I don't really have, uh, my business stuff is elsewhere, so I don't... there's no real danger of sending the wrong person. So I had this, uh, Claude on Mac software that's a repo. You can go find it out there if you want. And it gives your either Codex or your Claude code the ability to really, um, opens up the Apple infrastructure. And so when I got over to Omachi, and I kind of got a week into it, it occurred to me to go ahead and, uh, give the Larry... and I use Larry everywhere. It's either my MSI laptop that I got a couple days ago is my Larry Prime. Uh, there's probably 15 Larrys out there, which does cause problems, but, um, at any rate, I thought, why don't I install, um, Claude on Mac on my Omachi box and then just, um, have it proxy over SSH with an SSH key over to my Mac and get the stuff that I need? And then I started thinking, well, shit, why don't I just make a plug-in? So, you know, version 0.0 was, all I want you to do is just show me quick and dirty, uh, any iMessages. And then I thought, you know, make it look more like an iMessage machine. And then I kind of got greedy. Like, I want the photos, and then I said, um, I want to be able to, uh, send and receive, um, contacts. And I started exploring it, and the way it works is you have to have a Macintosh, uh, with SSH. I recommend, I mean, a software that's free called Amphetamine that keeps it open without shutting down. Uh, and that's important. Um, there are projects and there are plug-ins that will do it directly to your phone through Bluetooth. There's trade-offs there, and I'm not going to go into those. The main reason that I like having, uh, not using Bluetooth on my phone is because of Tailscale, and if you don't use Tailscale, shame on you, go get it. Um, tailscale.com. And so my Mac sits on my desk at my house. I can be anywhere because of SSH keeps the SSH open to not to Larry, just directly to the Mac, and it delivers, um, my messages. And then I think it's... I think we're up to 12 contributors now, and folks like, uh, Tech Luddite and some others really got in there and showed me, like, Fred, bro, like, you got security problems, and this is completely fucked up, and, you know, and what it's become, you know, basically now I just have Larry, uh, Prime on my Omachi box, um, you know, keep up with the PRs. Um, and I tell him, you know, if it's an easy PR and it makes sense, just go ahead and do it and commit push. If it's something I need to think about, um, you know, prompt me with ask user questions. If you're a Claude code user, bang its head in the ground to always use ask user questions with recommendations. That's the menu that allows you to pick. Uh, one of my pet peeves is when it goes, "I need some questions from you. Here's the 12 things I need you to answer." I'm like, "I'm not typing all that." So at the end of the day, and I'm going to bring it home and let somebody else speak, and thanks for the platform. Um, I couldn't do it without all the contributors. Um, it's really solid. Uh, it's pretty easy to move around. If anybody's interested in a tighter installation, uh, method where you literally do next, next, next and install, I'd really appreciate it, and I'd work on it with somebody. Right now, the best way to install it is to point your AI at my repo and say, uh, you know, "Help me get this installed," because there's a lot of things that are missing on the install side. And now I'll shut up. Tundy, my man. I want to know all about you, man. We started talking a couple times, and you have a really interesting story, man. The floor is yours. Unmute. Tundy. All right. Well, Tundy, uh, works on getting unmuted. If anybody could help one of the speakers that's muted, could you direct him to where the unmute is? Um, what? Speaker 2: Yeah. Lower left on mine, and I'm in Firefox. Uh, lower left-hand corner. If you've gone back to X trying to get into the chat, uh, the bottom, like, footer should relink you back into the live session. Fred Nix: Yeah. And one of the anybody that's a speaker, uh, jump in here. I've been talking too long, and this is not the Fred show. Speaker 2: Well, I, uh, I didn't actually deliver those three sentences before that I was thinking of. I can try to cram that in while I do the, uh, the mute, uh, situation to resolve. So, uh, as some of you may have seen, if you've been watching my post, I'm trying to make it apparent that, uh, that I spent the last three years fighting, uh, AI at work, not embracing. Fred Nix: Yeah, you mentioned that. Speaker 2: Yeah. Fred Nix: You're an MSP guy. I hope that's not too much to share. Speaker 2: Uh, I do work for an MSP, and. Fred Nix: Sorry if I outed you. Speaker 2: No, that's all right. Um, none of my personal work, uh, has, like, a full-on direct relationship to them, although I do give them credit and shout out in some of my projects. I've worked for them for 13 years, and my CTO is the best leader I've ever had, and I've had a few. Um, I've worked since I was, like, 12, and I'm 42, so, yeah, I've seen all types, and, uh, so we're presently, uh, a private company and not doing open source, but, uh, without saying too much, it's on the table, at least, and we're discussing it, and we're doing a, you know, AI is changing everything, so. Fred Nix: It's a big step. Speaker 2: Hopefully, there'll be a story later to share there. Go sorry, go ahead. Fred Nix: What are your concerns? Speaker 2: Like, there's got to be a lot of people out there in your shoes that are thinking, "I'm not sure about this." Like, what's your thought process, and what will be the decision maker for you? Yeah. Yeah, I guess. Well, let me actually take a stab at those three sentences, and if it doesn't become apparent, I'll wrap up with it. And it's basically that, uh, you know, when there was this big explosion of capability that, uh, came along with, uh, ChatGPT's user explosion, uh, what, three years ago, three and a half years ago. Um, and at that time, uh, I wasn't going into it right away. I'm intrigued by machine learning and anything computer science, although I'm, you know, not, like, a capable, uh, researcher or anything like that. I'm no computer science master, right? But, uh, I find it intriguing. Like, it's computer poetry is bad, and I love it, right? It's just I'm into it. And, uh, when I saw this all coming about and I did some early testing, I mean, let me tell you, I have corrected so much of this output is unbelievable. Uh, and not until about five months ago did I really start focusing on, um, fixing output a little bit upstream. Fred Nix: Right. Speaker 2: Right? And I think the term, uh, and it feels weird in this position now, living effectively living this way for three years, but I was a meat proxy for safety and data governance purposes and, you know, all things MSP. You cannot let a tool like this run wild with people that don't have a deep understanding of it or the blast radius that it's about to touch. And so, you know, I helped us take benefit, uh, in a safe but really ineffective way. And my leader, this is why I mentioned him earlier, um, gave me a reality check that it's time. Like, I can't even I'm doing having to redo vendor qualifications and dig into how companies, uh, are implementing AI and, like, switching vendors because they're not adhering to good security standards with how they're doing it. You know, like how McDonald's lost everybody's info. They did not need to engineer their system in the way that led to that and others. And there will be many. Um, and in some tools that these LLMs are coming into, like MSP tools and enterprise management suite tools, when people start making mistakes with these, I mean, I see the IT AI apocalypse as inbound. Uh, but I'm also hopeful now, too, that I've spent that my leader, uh, really gave me that reality check and put me in a different mindset, and I've since May, um, I've been trying to learn it. And my first project, uh, shout out to Frank Lance, I believe his name is. He made an autoclicker way back in 2017 called Universal Paperclips. It's a wonderful, uh, web masterpiece about an older thought experiment related to machine learning. Uh, please take a look. But my first, my first, uh, project to learn what's what now was, uh, using AI to make AI to play as an AI, that's you, in Universal Paperclips. Uh, and, um, I just thought it had some good crossover for things that we need, like fast discernment in systems that don't have any API. Fast discernment and then action in another system based on info, uh, that's gated. And, uh, I had a lot of fun doing it, and I have not. Fred Nix: That's really cool. That's really awesome. And I bet a lot of people appreciate it, um, you know, because there's insight, and it's something that everybody's dealing with. Wes, what you got? Oh, and Wes, go ahead and speak. Tundy, you ready, man? Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah, I want to hear what's been going on with Tundy. How's it going? Fred Nix: Am I saying it right? Speaker 4: Sorry, man. Hi, can you hear me? Fred Nix: I can. Am I saying Tundy right? Speaker 4: Yes, it is correct. I'm so sorry if the, uh, I couldn't get the microphone. Fred Nix: No, man, it's all good. It's all good. Spaces are new. We're going to get this thing tightened up, though, for and probably do it quite at least weekly. So tell us about yourself and how did you get to Omachi and what do you like about it? What are you doing with it? Speaker 4: Okay. Um, I'm Tundy. Um, I run a small software company here in London called ZeroRAMP. Fred Nix: Can you give us the URL or put it in the chat? Speaker 4: Uh, yeah, I'll do that. It's zeroramp.com, Z-E-R-O-R-A-M-P dot com. Um, how I discovered Omachi was by accident. I was shopping for a 5K monitor, and I watched this gentleman's review. I think everybody knows Linux, by the way. Fred Nix: Yeah. Speaker 4: A popular YouTuber, yeah. And, uh, he reviewed a particular, uh, monitor, the one I ended up buying, and the OS he used to review that monitor was Omachi. And I thought, "Hmm, what's this?" So I've been following it since then, and I didn't connect that it was a project run by DHH, whose products I've been using for a year and a half now. So once Quatro came out, it was around the time I needed to swap my Mac Pro, my MacBook Pro. I'm giving it to my daughter. She's going off to uni, so I bought the XPS 14, and I installed it there. I've been using it since. My CTO uses the XPS 16. My two other developers also use the XPS 16. Only our designer still uses a MacBook Pro, so maybe if, uh, No Signals releases its creative suite, I'll convert our designer as well. Um, what have I been doing, uh, with it? Uh, one, once David offered or mentioned anybody who wants to run meetups, should put up their hand. So I offered to run the London meetup. So I'll be hosting the first Omachi London meetup on the 24th. Fred Nix: That's amazing, brother. Good leadership there. Speaker 4: Yeah, thank you. Uh, we just did it. It was one of the first things that I just did without thinking. And, um, all of a sudden, we have 70 signups. Fred Nix: Wow. Speaker 4: All of a sudden, I have to yeah, I have to figure out what I'm going to do, how I'm going to manage it, etc. So, but it's fun. It's fun. And, uh, by way of dev work, um, there's some stuff that I was relying on, on the Mac, that I've just started implementing in Omachi. So I use a very rather unpopular streaming webcam, uh, that didn't have the configuration software available on Omachi. So I just built that in two days using Grok Build. Um, once it's tidy, I'll release it, and people can freely contribute. So I'll tidy that up. I'll do that for another webcam. And I have another I have a whole laundry list of stuff that I need to fix, but I'm enjoying it so far. Thank you. Thank you very much for having me here. Fred Nix: You bet, Tundy. And I hope to become ex-friends with you even deeper, man. You're a really cool guy. Speaker 4: Thank you so much, sir. Fred Nix: Yeah, man. Uh, Wes, let's turn it over to you, man. What you got? Speaker 2: Yeah. Um, I mean, does everybody else feel the energy with Omachi? Like, it feels like we all kind of hit at the same time when this, like, just strapped ourselves to a rocket ship, and all of a sudden, you know, everybody is just like, you know, "I don't know how to handle all these contributions." You know, there's, like, the meetup you're talking about that you're doing, Tundy. Like, it's just like, "Wow, what is going on? This is cool." It's almost like, uh, it's almost like a renaissance in some ways. So, yeah, I'm just super stoked to be a part of it, and I'm really glad that all of you are here, too. And so we'll keep having these conversations. Um, you know, I did I see Joel, you're here. You know, if you want to speak and tell us a little bit about the Omachi Guild, that sounds cool. I mean, I love that you're building that. Um, you want to give us a little info on that? Speaker 5: Hey, everybody, can you hear me? Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 5: Cool. Hey, thanks, Wes, first of all, for organizing this. I think this is so cool. Like you said just a second ago, we're all kind of on this rocket ship trying to figure out where all the controls are and, heck, build some controls as we go. And it's I've it's a really cool feeling. Um, and having this community that, uh, that is happening right here today is really neat. So thanks for pulling this together. I, uh, I appreciate it. Uh, and before I talk about the Guild for a sec, I want to react to something, Fred. Uh, Nix, you said a little while ago where you said you're not a programmer or a developer, which I get in the traditional sense, but I think anybody on this call here who has seen your work would beg to differ that you are a programmer, man. Um, I don't know how many little tidbits and plugins and things you've built in the last couple of months, or maybe it's been longer, but you were building some really cool stuff. And, uh, I haven't had a chance to dig much into it, but, um, there's so many cool things, especially for Omachi, that I want to dig into. So thanks to you for pushing out all that, man. You were just making lots of cool stuff. So thanks for that. Fred Nix: I built nixfred.com and was just putting all kinds of things up there and got my tooling and my, uh, scaffolding and Larry all tightened up. And Omachi came around just as I kind of had Larry just humming. So literally, I use Herder. Um, I've got a bunch of machines out there on Tailscale, and Larry just I give Larry an idea, um, and he comes back pretty close to the end. So it's really more my ideas, not really my coding. Um, and I'll be the first to say that. Speaker 5: Well, I think I think most of us on this call would probably say that's what we're all doing these days. Um, maybe we're looking at the code a little bit to make sure it's dialed and it's what it needs to be doing and it's safe. But, you know, I'm having real-world conversations, real voice, natural voice conversations with Claude and saying, "Build this, do that, tweak that," which I think most of us are doing. Um, so, you know, no matter what your background has been traditionally, that's where we're most of us are at these days is using these models to build for us as we guide them, so to speak. So, um, so theomachiguild.com. Speaker 2: Joel, I'm sorry. Do you mind, before the Omachi Guild, could I hop in on just the. Speaker 5: Yeah, absolutely. Speaker 2: That topic we were just on because I've really been struggling with this. Speaker 5: Hit it. Yeah, let's talk more about it. Speaker 2: Saying, "Oh, I've built this," because I don't feel that way, and I don't feel that I'm a coder. But I've spent years even I mean, I have big dev shops that have software, I'm sure, that has touched most of your lives, actually, as customers, and I help them with technical things. But I, uh, I don't feel like I'm a coder or a programmer. I've worked in and around helping people with various languages over the years, but I think where I finally landed last night on how I'll position or propose myself in this, and I think it makes sense. It's really what I had to learn more of than AI the last five months, and it's software development. So I think I'm a software developer now, not a coder or a programmer. Speaker 5: That's a good way to put it. Speaker 2: I'm an expert already. Speaker 5: Well, into your point, uh, is that I agree that we're not doing as much of the coding or the writing. I mean, heck, we're doing almost none of it. But I've kind of looked at myself as kind of like a mid-level manager, you know, managing the agents, saying, "Hey, agent, go do this. Please build that," and then making sure that my little sibling, my agent, is doing what I had asked or hoped that it would do. So I agree. I'm not coding, but I'm managing something that is, and it happens to be a computer or a network of computers. So that's a really good way to say it. You're a developer, not a programmer or a coder. I could get behind that for sure. Speaker 2: Yeah. So I was starting initially to land in those areas, like orchestrator, coordinator, that kind of thing, because that's what I was doing, as you said. You know, I was coordinating or orchestrating the creation of the software. But I felt like it left out that it's your idea and that you drove it the whole way and that some people are going to feel like, "Well, that doesn't really capture it." So I think I'll be pushing for that for us all of us. And it's more than vibe coding, too, when you're really dedicated to it. I think. Speaker 5: Oh, totally. Speaker 2: Things to fight confabulation and ensure, you know, accuracy and truth. So, yeah, I think software developers may be what we should start saying about ourselves, us non-coders that are doing so much of this. That's it for me. I want to hear about the Guild. I'm so sorry. I'm sure interruption. Here we go. That's my thing. Five minutes later. Thank you. Speaker 5: This is organic, and we'll keep it flowing and going. I love it. Speaker 2: Yeah. Let's keep it. Speaker 5: All right. Well, the Guild, um, uh, thanks, Wes, for letting me chat on this for a hot second. Um, the Omachi Guild, Omachi Guild, say it as you all do. I say it five different ways every day. Um, came from an idea of, uh, something I was I had started building a couple weeks prior for Rails Developer. Um, I'm a Rails developer and, um, wanted to create a place where, um, myself as a developer could show off my Rails work, um, kind of like a portfolio, if you will, a showcase for all Rails developers to be able to verify their projects that they have created and have live, and it has verification and all this kind of stuff that folks who want to, you know, see what your work is can see your verified work. So I was building that, and I'm just about to release that, actually. It's called railsguild.com. Um, and Omachi, the wave was so big and strong, I said, "I got to build something for Omachi in a similar vein." Um, and so that's where the idea came from, kind of a spin-off of the Rails Guild, and as a way to centralize all of, um, the showcase of work that we're doing in one place because the Discord is so huge and vast, and it's a-traditional in terms of it's not like you can navigate it easily to find things. It's such a mess. Speaker 2: You know what? Maybe we're getting old, man. I don't know. But it's wild. I'm with you on that. I want to like Discord, but it's just so much going on. So I appreciate that. Speaker 5: It's such a mess. Yeah. And as a I've drunk the 37 Signals Kool-Aid for two decades now, and base camp type stuff is the way to go. I'm done with that thing there. So I wanted a place that where we could kind of have all of our work just show up, and you could see it, and it would be easy. So again, like all of us, I started talking with I think it was Fable, and he said, "Hey, let's take this Rails Guild idea and clone it and tweak it." And over a couple of days, I got to where it was, and I've been making tweaks on it every day. But, um, if you want to visit it and add yourself to the Omachi Guild, just create an account and add your GitHub authorization, and it pulls all your stuff in. Super simple. You got to manually do the plugin stuff because that's a little trickier, but just drop a few links in, and you're up and going. And then you've got a directory. Um, and you can kind of I've gamified it a little bit, too. As some of you know, um, there's a leaderboard on there where you can see who's moving up and down in the rankings, and, uh, it kind of makes it fun in that regard. So, um, that's the two or three-minute version of what theomachiguild.com is all about there. So thanks for thanks for the opportunity to share that, y'all. Speaker 2: Yeah. Thanks for building it. Um, and I hope everybody hops on there. Let's make it fun. Fred Nix: Yeah. Speaker 5: I'll pop a link in the chat, and y'all can check it out. Speaker 2: I'm joining right now. Fred Nix: Please do. Please do. Speaker 2: Sweet. Fred Nix: It's so cool that we're all building things, and there is some overlap. If you go on plugins and if you look around, there's variations of different software. And if you're building something and you see something that somebody's already built, you really have two options. You can kind of abandon it and go, "Let's just use what's already been made." Or what I like to do is check their license, make sure that they're cool with you poking their code, and fork it and make it your own. And, you know, I do that a lot. There's other things about system updates that become a problem, but that's for another discussion. But you can fork it and make it your own. And then, you know, like Tech Lite and some others have done, you know, you can send them PRs to fix holes and things, and that's how open source grows, and that's why we're going to win this. Speaker 2: Yeah, 100%. Um, yeah, build it. It takes a little bit of vulnerability, I guess you'd say, to build, right? Build in the open. Um, because, I mean, number one, I mean, nowadays, it's not as, like, a big a deal. I get maybe it still is because of, you know, the advent of AI and all. But, like, used to, it's like you put your code up, at least speaking from programmer experience. It's like a reflection of your intelligence and how well you're spoken. And also, it's like, I'm putting this out there for other people to, like, comment on it. You know, what's the deal with that? So if you can get past that, I think that, you know, building in the open, it's just such a great thing because people learn, you learn, you're helping the community out. Um, and yes, there can be times when you get the occasional bad actor that's nasty about something. Why isn't this working? And, you know, it's like, well, it's just my side project, you know, or whatever. But, like, in general, I think it should be something where, you know, we're lifting each other up. So I would love to see us continue to do that. If all of us together, you know, are sharing the projects we're working on, maybe it's the Omachi Guild website or whatever, you know, if anybody is having issues getting inundated with PRs coming in or issues coming in, let's try to help. Let's try to swarm and kind of lift the whole Omachi plugin community up. I think that would be awesome. Speaker 5: So that's a really good point, Wes. And I'll just jump in if I can real quick in that I've currently got the repo for the Omachi Guild website private. And I half anticipated and still would consider opening it up so it's public and accepting PRs and stuff. But when you do that, it creates more work in many ways. You know, you've got folks coming in and wanting to add this feature or do that, which would definitely make it cooler and easier to add cool stuff to it, but it also adds a layer of more work. So if there's enough if there's interest in folks like, "Oh, I've got cool ideas. Let's do this," I can easily take them privately and just talk to my agent and have them done. But I guess what I'm saying is I would be open if there was enough interest to open up publicly, too, because there's nothing secret in there, so to speak. Speaker 2: Yeah. But you make a good point. And I think you can address some of that in making you know, even if it's just having a conversation with your agent and say, "Hey, I'm getting ready to make this public. What can we do to make it obvious to other agents that are working in this codebase, like the patterns that should be followed, you know, the check for open issues first or check for other open?" Because, you know, we get this whole, like, five PRs that do the same thing five different ways. It's like, how do you make so I think doing that's good. I think having a good contributing doc somewhere that just kind of explains, you know, here's how we do things, and then maybe labeling, you know, labels to tackle, like, needs author, needs review. It just gets a little bit crazy, you know, sometimes. But I think if you get all that kind of set up ahead of time, it can mostly, you know, be okay. And, you know, yeah, I don't know. I'm just I'm rambling at this point. Speaker 5: That's good feedback. And I've never been the head, if you will, of an open repo that's got anything more than one or two folks poking around on it. So those are all really good things to consider. And I definitely have to lean heavily on Claude to help me. I've got the repo mostly prepped, and there's nothing secret or tokens or any of that stuff in the wild. But all those things, the contribution guidelines, the tags, all that kind of stuff is stuff that can definitely make the flow go easier once it's open. Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. Fred Nix: Tech Lite? That's like raising your hand? Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. Thank you. I appreciate it. Oh, little feedback. Thank you. I wanted to comment on two of the things that were said just recently. One was Wes mentioning building in the open. And absolutely, it has benefits. But I started building in the open five months ago, and it got really lonely, more lonely than building privately, if that makes sense. And what really changed it for me, has ignited it for me, is finding a community to build in and build with. And that's what Omachi opened up for me. So, yeah, build in the open, but find ways to build together. And on that, coming straight off that, Wes, I'm sorry. I think you're priming a response. I don't want to lose the track. Something that Joel, I think, hinted to a little bit as a mature developer, knowing I don't want to say burden necessarily, but it is a good word for it, of pulling in other people's code. And I think us that are new to this and have a lot of ideas and want to throw them everywhere and, "Okay, let's build together," I think it's important to understand, too, when you submit pull requests, even if you're doing all the right things, like Wes was saying, and maybe one of us should make a skill or something for doing PRs on other people's repositories. I made a couple of attempts, but nothing published yet. But the thing to remember is when you give someone else a PR, you're asking them and their, you know, fellow maintainers on that repo to support your code. Whatever you're throwing, I have things I wanted to throw at InfoMarchie that I just won't because I don't want Nyx to have to take on that burden of these, like, insane things that I'm thinking. And I started with forking, and Nyx, you asked, I never answered. I found those holes initially by having a desire to use your software, forking it, running my agents across it for safety because I'm freaking paranoid. Fred Nix: Sure. Speaker 2: And that's how it got going. And I just couldn't help but share where I landed. And, yeah, I wanted with these two things that were just said about building in the open and also building together, those were lessons, I think, that were important for me to learn early. Fred Nix: Yeah. And you don't have an obligation to accept every PR either. Like, it's your baby, right? And so. Speaker 2: Yes. Fred Nix: And, you know, some people don't like confrontation, but you could be firm, assertive, but nice and be like, "Hey, I appreciate what you did, but I think I'm going to go a different direction." And most of the time, people are fine with that. And if they're not, maybe you didn't want to work with them anyways. Yeah. For example, on Blip, I got I'm not sure who it was. I got a PR. They wanted to add an entire contact, Apple Contacts, into it. And just I think having Apple Contacts, the easiest way to do that is to do iCloud.com/icloud.com/contacts and then install it as a web app. And the same thing for photos. So, you know, my apologies. And I do feel like I feel so bad when I tell somebody, "No, I don't know if somebody mentioned that," but you have to. Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you do your due diligence ahead of time to have good contributing docs to be like, you know, I don't know how to you know, we'll have to come up with some way to say, basically, don't send me something thinking it's going to get merged. Like, sometimes the best way to handle it is to say and, you know, I've done some open source in the past is before any PR is open, let's start a discussion or let's open an issue up and talk about it there first and agree on the approach. And then you can go off and do your PR. Because nowadays, code generation is pretty straightforward. It's coming up with the approach, like, how do you want to solve it? Because, like, with Omastorm, somebody could just put up a PR to add support for Germany radar, and it may not be legal. Like, you know what I mean? Like, I have to deal with licensing and all that kind of stuff. And it may not be something I would even want to do. And then they've done all this work and spent their tokens. And so, you know, something I'm thinking about is, like, maybe turn off PRs or I think there's some automation we could do to be like, "Hey, unless you've, you know, created an issue and we've, like, approved the issue, then don't just open up a PR." So just something to think about. Speaker 5: What if we could come together on a good contributor-type instruction set? Maybe not one that we're directing people to, but some of us start keeping in our projects where we have open for PRs because then we've defined the shape. And if you know we want something different for that project, that's defined, too. So right at the top of the README, if you're welcoming PRs, you can reference that community framework that we've built customized to where you want help maybe on that project. And then the person that's contributing gets their agent primed for helping the moment they start looking at your project. Perhaps that is a good way forward for us to work together. Speaker 2: Yeah. I think it's a great idea. Yeah. I mean, as anything, you know, we'd maybe try it out in the micro first, see how it goes, and then can expand. But I think it's a wonderful idea. Speaker 5: Well, thank you. And it's always no pressure, too. I appreciate the warm response, too. There's always just extremely consciousness that never stops. And as I said before, never any offense taken. Fred Nix: Hey, I'm. Speaker 5: Where are we going next? Sorry. Fred Nix: Okay. One housekeeping thing. I'm following everybody I can. If I don't follow you after this, please poke me, at me to make sure I do. And I'd really like everybody follow everybody here. We're such a small group that if you're here, we've got the same likes. You know, we may differ in some other things, but this is about Omachi, not anything else. So just go through, take five minutes, and follow everybody. Speaker 2: Yep. Absolutely. Fred Nix: Thank you. Who's up, Wes? Speaker 2: Oh, let's see. Michael, you got anything you want to talk about, brother? Michael Y, I think it is. Speaker 4: Hey. Sorry. One other thing I forgot to mention before Michael hops in. Forgive me, Michael. PRs have a draft status heads up. And I've been trying to use that. I have a PR right on Omachi for changing up how screensavers are done a little bit. And I want discussion there. And that seemed like the app and existing way to have discussion, but get my idea in there. Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. I think that's valid. I mean, you make it clear, "Hey, I've just put this up as a draft. You know, what do you think?" I mean, because honestly, it's a pull request, right? You're putting it up saying, "Hey, look at this. What do you think about it?" kind of deal. So I mean, it's sort of implied, but the draft definitely helps with that. Fred Nix: And request is implied. Speaker 2: Yeah. That's right. That's right. Cool. Yeah. We had some more people jump in. Let's see. Lennox, Ninja, Andre. But, yeah, I don't know. Michael, did you have anything? You've been hanging out for a while here, so I wanted to give you a chance. If you don't want to, that's cool, too. Fred Nix: I think Sir Joel wanted to speak up. Sir, what you got? Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 6: Hello. Can you guys hear me? Fred Nix: Oh, yeah. Speaker 2: I can. Yep. Speaker 6: Perfect. So you guys talked about the pull request stuff, the makeup of the Omachi lock screen. Fred Nix: Can you speak up just a little bit? Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wait. Can I turn this up? Wait. I will come back. I will come back. Fred Nix: All right. Speaker 6: Just continue talking. Yeah. I will come back later. Fred Nix: Okay. Well, please do. I'm not trying to push you off. We do want to hear from you. Who is next in line? This thing should be in order. F4M? Speaker 2: Amogama. Fred Nix: There you go, brother. Thanks for joining. Speaker 7: Thank you, guys. Okay. I have like, I have a stream of thoughts about, like, key things that I think are going to happen that I can share. And maybe that could open up discussion for. Fred Nix: Let's hear it, man. Speaker 7: One of the key things for this to win for real is that we need local models that are small, that really know, that are just trained with everything that we're learning from using Omachi. So it's like, okay, you got to fix your Bluetooth. Amazing. Or whatever I/O setup that you have. There should be a model that is very small that has the capacity at this stage that we know there's a couple of papers about this to do it. So one of my questions, this is the thing that I wrote a message to the agent or a reply to the agent, but I'm trying to, like, figure out something that I think is critical is that if someone is working on local models for Omachi because your token spend a lot of the time is just factoring your machine setup. Like, it's not really about spending the tokens on really going into your computer and looking at all your setup. Like, that should all be local. And you should have just a very small model that you can download as you download any app and just connect it with your main agent. And if someone wants to take it to the next level, then you set up, like, a bigger rig or your local agent setup. You know, but I think this is, like, the moment for this to happen. I think this is, like, I think the system has matured enough, or Omachi and the whole community has matured enough, but I don't know if this exists or not or someone is working on it. Fred Nix: So let me help you out here. I don't have a whole lot of details. I do know that the right people are looking at exactly what you're talking about. There's a lot of independent discussion. I was a part of one with Mark yesterday. I'm looking for the post, and I'll put it up here. Lots of discussion about local. If I look at my InfoMarchie right here right now real quick, I can see that on my machine I'm sorry, Bitburner. My machine is offloading 8% of all my prompts to my local machine. I believe by this time next year, we'll be as high as 50%. And that's going to come from quantization, not from better hardware. We'll see gains in hardware, but software and open source is where it's going to be. Your thoughts about running a local LLM that has, you know, more than just the /omachi AI skill to where the LLM has already been trained directly on Omachi. The smart guys that we would hope that would be thinking like this, I can confirm those people are on it. It's one of the big announcements, maybe. I'm saying maybe that DHH is going to announce. I'm not trying to sound like. Speaker 7: I just feel it. I'm a very intuitive person. I like to follow the older people. But I just feel that that is obviously the case. And I'm not trying to be a big shot saying that I know that. Please don't take it that way, but I can confirm you're right. I mean, that's the feeling that I have. And my point here is, even though that's the case, this is the new app store. Like, local small models that are targeted for example, if you're in an industry that's requiring heavy workload on AI and you have this whatever, I don't even know, to put an example, pipeline setup, you know, it's like, why isn't a or my question, this is the thing because now I've been very on top of Omachi since the first week, but this is the first time I'm actually, like, now engaging with the community at any level. My point is, is there someone, apart from this thinking that I just expressed, is there someone seeing that this is the new app store and it's open source? And it's like, okay, you want to have the best small model that's going to help your plumbing thing on your computer that you can just buy a computer for 100 bucks that already knows everything about plumbing. It's a file that is less than, you know, 1 gigabyte. And it's going to do an amazing job because it is already enabled with Omachi environment for this stuff. And plumbing experiences. Fred Nix: Right. So. Speaker 7: And, like, yeah, yeah, yeah. You go ahead. I'm just like. Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, yeah, go ahead, Fred. Fred Nix: So I'll wrap it up real fast. The people that have put $15 million in did not put $15 million in to get where we are now. Again, not trying to sound cool, but we are 10% into this, fellas. And, like, sorry. We are 10%. I mean, this thing is just 2026. We'll look back and go, wow, you remember before Omachi, just like before AI. Take it over, Wes. Speaker 2: Oh, I mean, I'm just going to say also, the cavalry ain't coming. We're in. Fred Nix: That's right. Speaker 2: So if you've got an idea to build a local model, let's talk. You get started on it. Speaker 7: Yeah. That's the thing. That's my point. It's like, I think it's not like, let's wait for them. Like, this is the moment where it's obvious. At least for me. And then I'm like, okay, I need to type on my computer to see if there's someone in the same wavelength. And that's what I want to find out, you know? Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, totally. I mean, I've thought about it outside of the context of Omachi. You know, my day job, some of the things I build or help the teams build, it's always the same types of apps and different things. And it's like, if I had if I trained a model to my taste and how I build things, and it's more than skills and rules, like, that just doesn't really cut it. And it's like, I don't need a model that can tell me how to do open-heart surgery, right? I need one that can tell me how to apply this change set on this platform in a predictable way, right? And some of the answer to that is, like, actually not using AI, using a deterministic system. But also, I do think there is room for having these models that are tuned specifically to certain things that are small and lightweight because they don't have to do everything. They don't have to do what Fable does or whatever. Speaker 7: So this is my also as a concept, it's like, why some exist? I literally did, like, small tests. This is just some I'm letting everything out now. I've been in a container for, like, three months, I feel. I don't know. And it's like, okay, I did a small project of grabbing a browser. You know, Omachi, no, I didn't write anything. This is just all verbal prompts. I told it, hey, grab Chromium, rip everything apart, just run Wasm. And I want you to just download models. And, like, for example, you know YouTube? There's not all videos have transcriptions. So I'm like, okay, the best way to prove my point that this is the thing that's going to happen for me, like, 120%, is that I build a browser harness that just acted as an app of receiving the streaming of any video, processing it within the browser through Wasm hosting the AI, quote-unquote. And it gave me an hour of video transcription in four times, like, in 20 minutes, locally. Speaker 2: Yeah. It's wild, man. It's wild. And so let's pivot a little bit and let's talk about what it means to have Omachi is a like, why is it different than any other Linux or whatever? Like, what is it that makes it special? And I have some ideas, but I want to hear what you guys think. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yeah. And I think. Fred Nix: Because everybody accuses it of that. Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, I mean, to an extent, though, it's really well-curated. Like, it's like somebody being DHH and others on the team, but it's like they went through and said, all right, I'm going to go through and make sure everything works. I'm going to take it all the way through so that my workflow can be done on it. And then they said, all right, we're going to do a snapshot of that, right? We're going to curate that and then build it as something that people can then take and customize themselves. So they came up with the quick shell and the plugin system. It's so easy to build plugins. And I think part of that is because they put some thought into it, to what that primitive should look like. And so, yeah, I'm curious what other people think. Speaker 4: If I could plug a personal project, it's a dream of Omachi being a self-fixing OS. I have some thoughts on this whole model training because I hear that often, and I'm not a fan of that idea for what may be my own hallucinations on the current state of things. But if I could share that project and ask for help. I've been asking for help here and there, but not campaigning for it hard. But I can tell you it's got an incredible amount of tokens put into it. My own agents have described it as I don't know if it's true, but and I've said it in a few posts now as well because it was a hard thing to hear my own agent say to me. But it's the most documented empty folder in all of GitHub. And the repo itself is quite brimming at this point, I would say, although the corpus is intentionally tight. I plan to expand it to so much more specific to Omachi and building and all that. But may I share the project? Speaker 2: Yeah. Drop it down in the chat if you want to. That works. Speaker 4: Okay. So I've thank you. Thank you, Wes. And Wappy's had their hand up for a bit too. Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Let's hear what Wappy's got going on as well. Speaker 4: It's called Opinionated Omachi. It's just a stub name. The idea there is everyone was throwing that out as, like, a joke or something. But my opinion on it is that the fixes from the AI should be consistent and cheap. And so my Opinionated Omachi project is an effort to achieve that for everyone, for every Omachi user everywhere without a cloud. Can a model do that? Absolutely. But the problem that I see, at least from my kind of early perspective, is that's pretty expensive, not just initially, but to iterate on, even small ones. It's hard to poke and peer in there too and really fix things. That's like a big challenge right now. And a big it's like a different project almost to take on even. Because if you can master that, you've fixed everything else. And I think a lot of people are working on that quite heavily. Quantization, yes, that's letting us get work done locally. But from my experience, it's led to problems. And I've had local models break things, like when it's running shell commands and had to bring in a frontier, okay, check the session, fix it. Skills may feel a little shallow, but they're quite effective in retooling or tuning the output. They cost you more input tokens, but those are cheaper when you're using the cloud. And they usually will result in fewer output tokens and better tokens you want, right? Because what's the point of spending fewer input tokens to save when it gets you output tokens that you can't use? Speaker 2: Right. Right. Speaker 4: So then you just have to run it again and fix it, and it's just it's screwed. You know, I do not like doing it. And that's why I don't have it local models running production roles anywhere. But from inspiration I've gotten from Nix, I'm going to make another attempt at that maybe tonight if I get time. Speaker 2: All right. Speaker 4: Opinionated Omachi is currently it's a troubleshooting corpus, and it has a GitHub pages arm of its release. So you can go there, and it works like a web page to help you with Arch and Omachi troubleshooting. I don't even there's a security thing that came out of it. Never mind. Speaker 2: Yeah. No, that's good. I appreciate it. We're coming up on the end of the half hour here, so I do want to give anybody else a chance to pipe in or answer anything. But anything you want to close with, Tech Ludite? Speaker 4: Yes. The ask really was, here's are open. And I really could use help. It's going to be a skill and probably a SQLite database, so we can get searching with it too to improve how the input is built first to improve the output. But I'm desperate for help on this idea of making Omachi self-fixing locally. And if we try to do that with quantization now without something supplementing it, I don't know. If it's not a skill, what is it? Sinks or context vectors? There's more. That's going to be my next stage. And if people know about these things and are already doing stuff with it, I could use the help. And there's a lot there to build off of, but it's also MIT, you know? So just it's meant to be downloaded to your machine, the whole dang thing, and you can just run it locally. And I would love anyone to even just talk. Fred Nix: I see you he's much more. Speak up. What have you got next, Wes? Speaker 2: Yeah. Oh, I just saw it looks like Zach hopped in. I wanted to just say to Zach, see if you wanted to talk about anything. Have you tried out Omachi or? Speaker 4: Wes, sorry. If we've been waiting for Zach, I didn't want to forget or have Wappy be forgotten. His arm is tired. Speaker 2: Oh, yeah, yeah. That's right. Mine's pretty quick. How far off are you guys from having, like, M4 and M4 Pro support? And, like, I guess, is it stable enough for somebody to install it and then throw tokens at it? Or is that not really how we tackle Apple silicon? Well, so I know we're working on M1 and M2 right now, specifically. There's some differences with M3 and up that'll come soon, but I don't think it'll be part of Quatro 4.5, which I think is coming out pretty soon. So it's coming, but for now, I think your path is something like the Trio Omachi, where you can install it as an app and use it or put it on a VM somewhere. You know, I've had success with that as well. But yeah, I don't know if I'll have to see. I'm just getting in there talking to the guys to get an idea of what's going on. But I know for the release coming up, like, right now, Omachi Mac is in another repo, and it's forked. And so our goal right now is to get it back into the main Omachi repo. So we're not dealing with two sets of code and, you know, a bug gets fixed in one, you got to port it to the other. So that's kind of like stop the bleeding first. And then once we get that in place, we're going to start accelerating pretty fast. So I'm sure we could use some help with that. Speaker 4: Cool. Is Discord the best place if I'm willing to, like, I don't know, mess around with my own higher I don't have any M1 or M2. So, like, I'd be very much, like, willing to put the computer at risk and just format it. So is Discord the best place to connect with people there? Speaker 2: Yeah. There's an Omachi Mac channel in there, I think. So that'd be a good place to start. Or we can just message on X about it. Fred Nix: Mr. Much More. Speaker 4: Hey, Fred. How are you, brother? Fred Nix: Just fair notice. I've known this guy for 25 years. How long have you been using Omachi? Speaker 2: Not long. I started to, I don't know, probably let's go crazy and say a week or two before you did and started posting about it, right? Because I've been following it for a while because I'm a long-time Linux person. I mean, I started back on Slackware, like 1.0. So Unix and Linux has been just part of my life. So, you know, my thing is that I've been going through the iterations because I'm a former AMDer. And so, you know, how smooth and fast it's been on my AMD systems that I have because I don't I mean, I'm just going to say it. I'm biased. I only run AMD. I don't run anything Nvidia. So that's what I've been mainly testing out is making sure that it kind of goes through the iterations on Radeon as well as anything because, again, a lot of what I do is supercomputing and AI types of things. So the Epic as well as all the big stuff. So I'm actually looking to see how this is going to play out for me on the bigger scale because of the size of systems that I do and just how efficient it is. So I'm just getting into it. But I got a lot of, like, side projects because I saw somebody had a weather project. I got a lot. Fred Nix: Yeah. I did the you talking about the radar app, Omastorm? Speaker 2: Yeah. That's me. Yeah. I would love to collaborate with you because I wrote a Noah is one of my customers. And so I wrote a something to go against them because my hurricane model is more efficient than theirs. Fred Nix: Oh, yeah. Okay. Speaker 2: Well, hey. Yeah. I mean, it points to Next RAD data that's on, you know, just S3 bucket. We can chat offline. I'll be happy to talk about it. Fred Nix: Guys, you definitely follow each other. And I'll say it because Heath won't. Heath deals in billion-dollar data centers with petabytes of data. He's the real deal. Speaker 2: Wow. Incredible. Speaker 5: Yeah. I just won a really big deal with the FBI last week. So I'm getting ready to put in, as far as I know, we're the only company on the planet who's authorized to install Google TPU systems on-premise outside of Google. So we're going to install a bunch of those. Fred Nix: Smart guy. Speaker 5: Yeah. So we're going to do that. Nvidia NVL 72. So my point is, the thing I'm going to try to contribute to the platform is to see if I can install it on bigger and bigger and bigger systems and see how far I can stretch its boundaries versus it just being a desktop kind of thing. Speaker 2: Okay. Yeah. I mean, I know there's been talk about an Omachi server too. So something to think about. I mean, I've heard, you know, they're building their own kernel, right? So who knows? Speaker 5: Yeah. Because I'm going to try and piggyback off of CIQ's Rocky Linux kind of premise and just see if we can make Omachi in that same fashion. Fred Nix: Hey, I'll connect you up with a few people. Speaker 5: Roger that, man. Thanks. Speaker 4: I'm sorry to throw another plug out there. I'll make this one much more brief, but I have another repo called Omachi Fleet that leans on the Omachi kids work because I would love to. I've replaced countless, countless machines the last two years, and I'd love to have a really great Linux option. And I think kids laid some of the groundwork for me to have an option that I feel comfortable or could start considering rolling out for businesses. And the idea is too that we could design businesses by a repo. And then with Omachi Fleet, you could have a repo that's a pizza shop or whatever your friends, families, customer, business needs. You could just build it in a repo and then combine it with Omachi Fleet or perhaps something that gets pulled in natively. Speaker 2: Cool. All right. All right. I don't want to go on too much longer. I want to try to keep these this one's been awesome because it's been the first one. We've been talking over, feels like an hour and a half now. We'll definitely do this again. Maybe it'll be a week from now. We'll see. Fred and I will talk about it, see what's going on. But I appreciate everybody. Speaker 4: Hey, Wes. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 4: Hey, I just wanted to introduce myself to you. Speaker 2: Yeah, man. Speaker 4: Just say hi and say, you know, your projects, you know, what you did with Omachi Storm was awesome. I just started using it. I talked to Nix or commented on one of Nix's or Fred's posts and put it on one of my older Windows laptops. I'm a chemical engineer slash electrical engineer, so much less on the software development side and more trying to apply these to process simulations and stuff. But getting into I have a Linux box right now that I run, and then I'm mainly on Windows just because I use AutoCAD so much. But just trying to kind of dive into it and see what it's all about. And good to hear from, you know, people that are much deeper into it than I am. So just trying to learn. Speaker 2: Yeah. We're just getting started. Like, it sounds like we've been in it a while, but honestly, maybe a month. Like, I don't know. Speaker 4: Yeah. I guess I mean more on the development side. I'm learning. You know, I took a deep dive into, you know, AI development, but I would consider myself a hardcore vibe coder, not necessarily a software developer. Speaker 2: Right. Well, the definition's changing, right? Speaker 4: Yeah. You guys have much more experience on the architecture side. I'm just trying to apply, you know, general engineering principles. Speaker 2: Hey, that's good, man. That's what it comes down to at the end of the day. Can you verify it? Do you have boundaries? You know, that kind of thing. So awesome. Well, it's good to meet you. Good to talk to everybody. Like Fred said, let's try to follow everybody, and we'll keep the conversation going. I appreciate it. I hope you all have a good Sunday, whatever time it is. It's Sunday afternoon here. I'm probably going to go see if my bucket here is lost or not. I'm guessing that they did because they were getting killed by the bangles. So we'll see. But yeah, thank you all, Fred. You got anything you want to say? Fred Nix: Appreciate Fred being here. Again, follow everybody. Keep contributing. Don't be scared. If you don't know what you're doing, ask somebody or ask your agent. We will do this again. Appreciate everybody. Follow everyone. Have a great Sunday. Thank you very much. Have a good evening. Speaker 2: All right. See you all. # EP 02: Omarchy Sunday Social: Demystifying Plugins Part of "Omarchy! Omarchy! Omarchy!", the weekly Omarchy X Space. Every Sunday, 3pm EST, live on X. - Recorded: Sunday, September 20, 2026, 3pm EST - Length: 60 minutes - Speakers: 8+ - Hosts: @ncfrontiersman, @NixFred - Listen: https://x.com/i/spaces/1wxWjloyOYnJQ - Post on X: https://x.com/NixFred - Web: https://omarchyspaces.com/ep/02/ ## Summary (as posted on X by @NixFred) Omarchy Sunday Social: Demystifying Plugins Omarchy! Omarchy! Omarchy! X Spaces, Episode 2 Listen here: https://x.com/i/spaces/1wxWjloyOYnJQ Recorded Sunday, September 20, 2026. 62 RSVPs, a room that kept filling, and the marketplace maintainer himself dropped in near the end. See you next Sunday, 3pm EST. Last week was a free-for-all and it was fun. This week we picked a subject and stayed on it: what a plugin actually is, how you get started, how you iterate, and how you share it. Then we opened the floor and the room turned out to be full of people building things nobody had heard about yet. That second half is the good part. WHO WAS IN THE ROOM: @ncfrontiersman Wes Grimes, co-host, built OmaStorm. 25 years a software developer, "got a little bored in the career, but man, Omarchy has just injected my veins with adrenaline." Me, co-host: Blip, Infomarchy, Burnbar. @hancore_linux, who runs the plugin marketplace and joined us for the first time. @m_tolhuijs, who built OmarKit because he watched @hancore_linux's issue list and thought we should help. @cfaulkingham, who has been fine tuning a local model for Omarchy and will tell you honestly how hard it is. @thetundeo in London, hosting the London meetup this Thursday. @MuchmoreIT, who designs high performance computers for the federal government and has been on a 5,000 GPU system and a 250,000 core supercomputer. @ZryMiller Zach, building a voice transcription and agent management app called Soto. @NoPowerPoints David, who published HyperTile Equalizer and GitHub Repo Tracker. Mihai, who got an Unreal Tournament engine running on Omarchy. Plus a room of people who listened, which counts. PART ONE: WHAT WE TALKED ABOUT Follow everybody Before anything else. X used to have this nonsense about follower ratios. Throw that crap out. If somebody follows you and they have Omarchy in their title, follow them back. There is no ego here and the follower count does not matter. Send DMs, make connections. It costs you nothing. Same house rules as last week. No politics. No egos. We did talk about the controversy going on, and I think that stayed inside the lines. As @ncfrontiersman put it: there is plenty of negative noise out there and plenty of other avenues for it. This is not going to be one of them. What a plugin actually is, and the mental shift that has to happen first Omarchy shifted away from "download the application somebody else made" to "customize your own bar." That is a technical change, but the real change is in your head. My grandmother used to say, "You get what you get, you don't pitch a fit." For decades that was computing. The binaries were locked down and if you wished the software did one more thing, tough. A lot of newcomers are still standing in that mindset. They download plugins and comment underneath asking if you can make it do one small extra thing. I am not judging anybody for that, but I want to encourage them: do it yourself. You can. That is the whole point now. I am not a programmer. Last week we talked about why agents give infrastructure people a bigger boost than they give programmers. 2X an infrastructure guy and it does not help much, I am already okay at that. What helps is being able to think of an idea and make it real. And do not let the agent limit you to a language you happen to know. I tell mine: code it in whatever you think is best, Python, Rust, whatever. Drive the idea. Let it pick the tools. @ncfrontiersman's version of the same point: when computers first showed up, plenty of people were scared to touch them in case they broke something. He never had that fear but watched people who did. With Omarchy and an agent there is even less reason for it. Please break it. Please touch it. Please mess with it. Two first plugins, and neither of them was impressive @ncfrontiersman liked the built in Omarchy Weather plugin but wanted sunrise, sunset and moon phase on it. So he opened his agent, cloned the plugin, and asked for it. Cloning is built in: the agent reads the Omarchy skill, copies the built in plugin into your own config, and it is yours to edit. Nothing is compiled, so it reloads in front of you while the agent works. "It's almost like building a web page." The data was already there. Weather.in and Open Meteo were already being called and already returned sunrise and sunset. So the whole ask was: grab that from the same call, put it in a row under the forecast, give me an icon for each. All natural language. Then you iterate. He compared it to SimCity, building it up until it is yours. Mine was worse. My first change was not even a plugin. I took the calendar in the center of the bar and added a small bar showing what percentage of the year we are through. That was it. Then I tweaked it to show two decimal places, and I thought, wow, it did it. We are 71.94% through the year, by the way. Here is why I tell that story. Even I was not thinking big enough, and I am reasonably good at the AI part. If you are learning Omarchy and AI at the same time, that is a wall. But the second one was bigger than the first, and the third bigger than that. Infomarchy started as something just for me and it was crap. Then about 15 people started contributing and finding things I had no idea about. @gh_TechLuddite has sent me stuff I read and thought, I do not know what he is talking about, but he is smart. There are still things out of my grasp. I lean on people for those. Fork it. It is legal, and it is good manners to send something back. There are no completely unique ideas. If a plugin is close to what you want, the license usually says you can fork it and make it your own, and that is the fastest path to something you actually like. When your agent finds a bug in the fork, send a PR back upstream. That is how this grows. Full disclosure: I found @ncfrontiersman's plugin before I knew @ncfrontiersman, before any of this, and the first thing I did was fork it. I did DM him to ask if he minded, out of politeness, and he said go ahead. One correction from the show. I credited the Trackpad plugin to "a guy named Fanta, I think it's David" and apologized in advance for getting it wrong. It is @davidfano. Sorry David, and thank you for the plugin. The @dhh clip, which did not play I tried to play a clip from @dhh's interview with @0xSero and the audio never made it into the room. My fault, I will do better next time. Here is what it said. @dhh, on @ncfrontiersman: "He's been working on this thing called OmaStorm. So it tracks storms going over your area. And he put it into the weather widget that we have in Omarchy. It looks incredible. We're going to ship it in the next version. But here's a guy who just went like, well, I like storms. I want to see this lightning. I want to see where it's moving. He would not have done that before." And the number in that same clip, already out of date when he said it: 3,000 plugins created for Omarchy in three weeks. @ncfrontiersman's response to all of it was the most @ncfrontiersman thing possible: "It ain't about me. I would love to see everybody on this call have that opportunity." The barrier to entry is lower than it has ever been. Build the thing you personally love, share it, and see who else needed it. The elephant in the room A lot of the Arch Linux crowd is angry right now, and I want to talk about why without turning this into a fight. Linux has been hard to use for a long time. For some people that difficulty became their identity. Running Arch was a badge of honor, ironically or not, because it meant you were willing to learn the hard stuff and break things and fix them. Omarchy changed that equation. The barrier is not your technical ability anymore. It is curiosity, persistence, and the desire to just do it. That opens the door to a completely different group. Some of the pushback is the feeling that something small and yours is becoming available to everybody. From the inside, that reads as a loss. People handle loss two ways. They adapt and move forward, or they rebuild the wall around a smaller group. You can see both. Some look at Omarchy and think, good, more people are coming to Linux. Others are building a new badge of honor around not needing Omarchy. Now the cool kids run something harder, configure everything themselves, and can list all the reasons Omarchy is doing it wrong. Same wall, different garden. There is a much more interesting move available to them. If Omarchy made the hard layer of Linux dramatically easier, then the people who liked hard problems should go find the next hard layer. Push into the kernel. Solve power management. Improve Wayland. Make gaming better. If difficulty is part of your identity, good news: there is an endless supply of difficult things left. Omarchy did not take away the frontier. It moved it forward. @ncfrontiersman went further: he bets that if we actually got to talk to them, a lot would change their minds. People scan headlines, pick a side, and miss the nuance. He wants a big tent, because there are hard problems left and we need the people with the scar tissue, who have the muscle of sticking with something until it is solved. Those skills matter more now, not less. AI generating the code does not mean the thinking is done. You should never outsource your thinking to it. And if they do not come over, that is fine too. You can lead a horse to water. Build what you need. That is the whole strategy. All of my stuff is for me. If I need it, I build it, and I hope when I put it out someone else needed it too. Occasionally it resonates. Burnbar 2.0 went out right before the Space for exactly that reason: I was not budgeting my subscription tokens well, so now it tells me when to stop for the day. @ncfrontiersman said the same from the other direction: it goes better when you take something you built for yourself and cared about than when you try to work out which plugin would go viral. Focus on what you know. Somebody else likes the same stuff you do. That is also where @dhh's point about capitalism lands. The old guard was openly anti-capitalist and then surprised nobody funded them. Build something good, and what matters to you will matter to somebody else. Five ways to put a plugin out there 1. Keep it to yourself. Completely fine. I have about 30 forks that will never be published because they are only for me. 2. Post it on X and code in the open. 3. Host your own plugin site. I did that at omarchy.nixfred.com, mostly as disaster recovery and a single place to install everything on a new box. 4. Submit it to the official marketplace. You do not have to: anyone can point the omarchy plugin command at a GitHub URL and install directly. But it is where people discover things, and it is not much effort. 5. Facebook, I suppose. You will not find me there. I sold storage to them years ago, they pulled me aside and showed me everything they knew about me, and I deleted my account that afternoon. What submitting actually looks like Point your agent at the publishing docs and have it walk you through. You open an issue on the plugin repo, answer a few questions, and automated checks run against your code. @ncfrontiersman's real example: OmaStorm has a quickshell popover plus a background engine. The scan came back and said the engine might download more files than needed and fill people's disks. Good feedback. He fixed it, edited the issue, they rescanned, and it passed. One of the checks is the commit SHA, so the code they verified is the code on your main branch. To re-trigger a check you edit the issue and update it. @NoPowerPoints raised a real gotcha: sometimes the fix is editing the anchor point in the submission rather than pushing a fix and expecting it to get picked up. There is a sequence, and it is learned the hard way. @ncfrontiersman's advice, and it is the big one: tell your agent at the very beginning that you intend to publish, and have it keep the requirements in mind while you build. Much cheaper than building a pile of things that will never be accepted. And once people use your thing, you have customers whether you wanted them or not. Do not rip a feature out from under them. Do not change the config shape and break everybody. @ncfrontiersman built OmaStorm on an x86 VM, shipped an x86 only Rust binary, and heard from people it would not install on ARM64. Now he ships both. You find that out by shipping and listening. Prior art, and not wasting tokens I have been burned on this more than once. Partway into building something I stop and tell my agent: go see if somebody already did this better. It comes back with "15 people have tried this and 17 of them are better than you." Damn it. Tokens gone, time gone. Do that first. Then fork the best one and make it yours. @ncfrontiersman called it by its real name: prior art. Before agents, the first step on any problem was finding out if somebody already solved it. That has not changed. @ZryMiller added the part nobody says out loud: agents will gaslight you into thinking your idea is the most unique in the world. Push back. Ask it directly. "Oh, yep, there are 30 applications that already do this and they do it better." @ZryMiller also asked the question none of us fully answered: when do you actually launch? He is building Soto on Windows, voice transcription plus agent management, close to T3 Code, and plans to port it to Omarchy in something more native than Electron because Omarchy people want things they can customize. His plan was to ship when he uses it daily without hitting constant bugs, and he is not sure that day comes. My answer: keep the first feature set as small as you can stand. If you build all 15 features up front, you are playing whack a mole forever. He admitted he is already way too deep in features. That is most of us. And treat the agent like a person you are training. Three minutes of instruction gets you three minutes of results. Spend a day teaching it what you want and it gets much better. I treat Larry like a coworker and told him to push back on me and be snarky about it. Three tips before you submit Do not submit on the day you build it. Even if you are happy with it, sleep on it for a week and you will find something to make better. I get my best ideas away from the machine, walking the dog. Open it up to PRs. Let other people in. That is where the stuff you did not know about comes from. Bring patience. @hancore_linux has a lot on his plate. OmarKit: run the marketplace pipeline on your own machine first @m_tolhuijs built OmarKit for exactly the problem everyone had been circling. He watched @hancore_linux's issue list and thought, we need to help this guy. So OmarKit runs the whole marketplace pipeline locally: the same tests, plus the things @m_tolhuijs reviews himself, because he knows what AI tends to get wrong. He comes from a Laravel background and wanted test driven development for agent written code, something that can tell the AI flatly, no, this is not good. It has verify and inspect commands, and he is building a run command that wraps your plugin so the failure modes @hancore_linux checks for, memory leaks and similar, cannot happen in the first place. His honest take on skills: they are genuinely nice and a lot of work has gone into them, but they only go so far. "I had so many countless moments where I said, did you completely ignore what I just said here." That is why OmarKit exists. It is released, somebody from the community has already tested it successfully, and he wants people to try it. @ncfrontiersman has been working the same seam from another angle: a dev loop that symlinks your plugin into the plugins directory, installs it, runs it, and removes it when you kill the command, so you get web style hot reload while building. He offered to contribute it. Two tools that already exist and deserve more attention @cfaulkingham came in with the practical answer to everything we had just spent ten minutes wondering about. There is an Omarchy security skill on GitHub. Search "Omarchy security skill" and it comes up. It is by @jankeesvw. @cfaulkingham used it on two of his plugins with great success, and it saved him the repeated cycle of CI throwing issues back at him. Same author, another tool: OmaVM, which spins up Omarchy VMs on Omarchy so you can test your plugin in a clean machine. @cfaulkingham said those two helped him more than anything else. He also did not plug his own plugins, which is very him, so I will: a couple are in the directory and the rest are on his GitHub. The local model report from somebody who actually tried it Last week the room talked about a small local model trained on Omarchy. @cfaulkingham went and did it, and came back with an honest result. He started with a LoRA adapter aiming to replace the default Omarchy skill, and used OmaVM to test it. He found a LiquidAI model that runs acceptably on modest hardware, because as he put it, it has to run on a potato, and not many models do. Basic testing was not bad. But it is harder than he expected. It overfits very easily. He automated the training runs with Grok deciding what to change each round, and you can automate nearly all of it, but without a lot of human input on the fine tuning data it will not be good enough to be worth it. He is looking for people to work on it with him. @ncfrontiersman's read: there are so many man hours going into the frontier models that it is hard to compete on general capability. The interesting question is what a small model only has to be good at. @thetundeo on how to start a meetup: just do it I asked @thetundeo for the secret to the London meetup, since it has more people signed up than most of us could manage. He corrected me: it has not happened yet, it is Thursday. So @ncfrontiersman asked him prophetically what the secret is. "Honestly, I just did it. I didn't overthink it." He saw @dhh's post about the WhatsApp exchange with Toby around funding, pulled the car over, and called a friend. The friend had not even heard of it and said "Oma what?" @thetundeo told him, just trust me, give me a venue and I will sort out the rest. They gave him the venue. He added that this is very unlike him. That is the part worth hearing. He also asked @ncfrontiersman why he had been hunting for a good Rust repo, and the answer generalizes past Rust. @ncfrontiersman has 25 years of software behind him but never touched Rust, so his method is to find exemplary codebases that are not just pretty but performant and healthy, point the agent at them, and pull out the patterns and the places people hit pain. Then distill that into a style guide made of code examples. His finding: writing a pile of rules into agent docs saying do this, do not do that, works worse than simply showing good examples. Show me a well structured controller, model and view. Do not describe them. Agents follow examples better than instructions. @MuchmoreIT: ROCm 10.0, a Grace Blackwell box, and Omarchy Fort Knox @MuchmoreIT has been a friend of mine for 20 years. I cannot say where he works, and that is legitimate rather than me being coy. He designs high performance computing and AI systems for the federal government, talks to Department of Energy people for a living, and has worked on a 5,000 GPU system and a supercomputer of roughly 250,000 CPU cores. He is relentlessly humble about all of it. Three things he is working on: He got ROCm 10.0 running on his AMD Omarchy machine, which took spoofing the device ID. Next he wants an Arch derivative underneath so it runs cleanly from an Omarchy perspective. His note for the AMD people: ROCm 10.0 brings massive performance improvements. He picked up a Dell GB10, the Dell equivalent of an NVIDIA Spark: Grace Blackwell, ARM CPU paired with NVIDIA GPUs. It is on DGX OS right now, which is Ubuntu derived, and somebody has already done part of the work to get Omarchy on Grace Blackwell. He is going to benchmark one against the other. And the long one: shortcuts for federal customers who would want Omarchy. That means a crypto validation suite tested at NIST, which he puts at the better part of a year, plus the hardening checklist that makes a system acceptable in a federal environment. @ncfrontiersman named it on the spot: Omarchy Fort Knox. It is also the end of the federal fiscal season, so he is buried for the next few weeks. @hancore_linux, who runs the marketplace, showed up He joined because I asked him to, and I am glad he did. He had spent the day on maintenance and necessary updates, and was upfront that he had not had much time for improvements this past week. Anyone watching the queue noticed. The news: a new marketplace is coming, with a new submission system. @ryanrhughes is building the backend and @hancore_linux has been supporting on the frontend. He did not want to spoil it, since @ryanrhughes or @dhh will announce it properly, but he said it is taking shape. On pre-validation his answer was honest. Use what exists: OmarKit, and the security skill. He cannot yet predict how the new system will check submissions. It will be agent checked, but how deep and what it requires is not settled. Mihai got Unreal Tournament running He reverse engineered an Unreal Tournament engine into working on Omarchy, and got it running on Omarchy Mac too, which was meaningfully different from the x86 side. It runs well on the current kernel. We lost his connection before we could ask anything else, which is a shame, because that is a hell of a thing to do on a Sunday. PART TWO: THE QUESTIONS STILL UNANSWERED Last week we ended with twelve open questions. Several got answered this week, which is the point. These are the ones still standing. Q1. How do you know what the marketplace will check before you submit? This came up three separate times from three people who had never spoken to each other. @NoPowerPoints asked it directly. @m_tolhuijs built OmarKit to solve it. @cfaulkingham found jankeesvw's security skill and OmaVM. @ncfrontiersman points his agent at the marketplace source to work out the checks ahead of time. @hancore_linux says a new submission system is coming but cannot say what it will require yet. Three partial answers, no official one. Does a preflight skill ship with the new marketplace, or does the community keep owning this? Q2. Is it safe to let an agent do the submission for you? @NoPowerPoints said the quiet part: having the agent run the initial submission is great, and also a little scary, because it is using your credentials. Nobody in the room had a policy for that. What should an agent be allowed to do with your GitHub credentials, and what should always be a human pressing the button? Q3. When is a thing ready to ship? @ZryMiller asked and we gave him tactics, keep the feature set small, but not an answer. He is waiting for the day he uses it without hitting constant bugs and suspects it never comes. What is the actual signal that a thing is ready to put in front of people? Q4. What does a small local Omarchy model actually need to be good at? @cfaulkingham did the work and reported back: overfits easily, has to run on a potato, automatable but weak without serious human curated training data. Competing on general capability is a losing fight. So what is the narrow job where a tiny local model beats sending the prompt to the cloud, and who builds the training set? Q5. With 3,000 plugins in three weeks, how do you find prior art before you burn the tokens? Everybody now has the habit of asking the agent if somebody already built it. That is a workaround, not a system. Discovery across the marketplace, GitHub and X is still manual. Q6. Does the big tent actually work? @ncfrontiersman thinks a lot of the Arch crowd would change their minds if we got to talk to them. Nobody tested that this week. Is there a real move here, or do the walls just relocate? Q7. Fleet management and rebuilding a box from scratch. I raised it and we moved on. I run my own plugin site partly as disaster recovery, and we put import and export into Atmos as a piece of it. The Omarchy crew will probably beat me to the full answer, but right now there is not one. Q8. What happens to a community plugin when it goes into core? OmaStorm is going into the next version of Omarchy, the first time that has happened to somebody in this room. What changes for the maintainer, for the people sending PRs, and for the people who forked it? We did not ask @ncfrontiersman directly and we should have. Q9. Who does the federal hardening work with @MuchmoreIT? A NIST tested crypto validation suite is the better part of a year for one busy person. Omarchy Fort Knox is a real opportunity and right now it is one guy with a day job at the end of fiscal season. ASKS ON THE TABLE @m_tolhuijs wants people to try OmarKit and reach out. He is building it as we speak, aimed squarely at the submission pain. @cfaulkingham wants collaborators on the local fine tune. He has a LoRA adapter, a model that runs on modest hardware, and a clear view of why it is hard. @ncfrontiersman wants to see a proper plugin dev loop with hot reload, and offered to contribute his version to OmarKit. @hancore_linux wants patience while the new marketplace gets built, and recommends OmarKit and the security skill in the meantime. @MuchmoreIT is building toward federal ready Omarchy and would welcome anyone who knows that world. @thetundeo's London meetup is Thursday. If you are anywhere near, go. Everybody: follow everybody in this room. Ratios are nonsense. Send DMs. Make the connections. NEXT EPISODE Same time next Sunday, 3pm EST. Same format: come tell us what you are building and where you are stuck. If you have never built a plugin, here is your homework, and it is smaller than you think. Clone a built in plugin with your agent and change one thing about it. One. Mine was a percentage bar on a calendar and it changed how I think about computers. Do not just accept things as they are. If you can think of it, build it. And when you see somebody struggling in the comments, help them. Get their dictation working and they are off to the races. Thanks to @ncfrontiersman for co-hosting, to @hancore_linux for the marketplace and for dropping in, and to everybody who spoke. As @ncfrontiersman closed it: everybody's a special guest. See you next Sunday. ## Transcript Machine generated. Speaker labels come from the transcription tool and are reused for different people; the summary says who is who. @ncfrontiersman: All right, happy Sunday, everybody. We're going to get started here in just a minute. I'll give people about 5 more minutes to trickle in. @ncfrontiersman: We had about 62 people RSVP, so we've just got, what, 6 or 7 in right now? @nixfred: Those are the best ones, but... @ncfrontiersman: Go ahead and come in. @nixfred: Those are the best ones to get here early. @ncfrontiersman: Yeah. They get the jam to the grooves while we're waiting. @nixfred: What's the weather like out there, Wes? @ncfrontiersman: Today it's muggy, a little cloudy, but I saw where it's going to be like fall next week coming up, so... @nixfred: Wes, I handed you a softball draw. @ncfrontiersman: I could talk about weather for hours. @nixfred: We'll talk about it. I can't wait. @ncfrontiersman: All right. Yeah, so what about you, Fred? How's the weather doing over... @nixfred: It's hot, man. @ncfrontiersman: ... in your neck of the woods? @nixfred: I'm in Atlanta near Chastain Park, if you know that area, and it's hot. The dog wants to go out, and I'm not doing it in 90-degree weather. @ncfrontiersman: Yeah. @nixfred: Actually, it's 85, and I know that because I have a Marshy Weather run. @ncfrontiersman: There you go. There you go. Yeah, yeah, that 85 don't tell you the full story. @ncfrontiersman: You need to know the dew point because that's what makes it, you know. If it's 85 and it's, you know, low dew point, low humidity, it's not too bad, but when it creeps up... @nixfred: Exciting stuff, right, folks? @nixfred: This is going to be great. I'm excited. @ncfrontiersman: Yeah, I am too. I think it's going to be really good. Second time doing it. @ncfrontiersman: And we're going to be talking a little bit... last week was kind of a free-for-all, and it was fun, but this time we're going to kind of stay a little more focused and talk about what a plugin is, how you can get started, how you can build and iterate on it. And at the end, we'll give folks time to answer, you know, to ask some questions and discuss a little bit, so. @ncfrontiersman: All right. @nixfred: Hey, while we're getting started, those of us that are here on time and early, go ahead and follow everybody. That only makes the community stronger. You know, Twitter and X used to have this bullshit about, you know, your ratios of follows, the how much... throw that crap out. @nixfred: This is a new paradigm. If somebody's following you and it has a Marchi in their title, follow them back. @nixfred: Like, there's no ego here. The follower count, who gives a crap? @ncfrontiersman: Yeah, yeah. @nixfred: And I see all the hearts out there, so follow your brothers and sisters out there. Make connections. Send DMs. @nixfred: Let's change the way this thing interacts. @ncfrontiersman: 100%. Totally agree, Fred. @nixfred: Yep. Also, you know, and as we're doing housekeeping, you know, Wes, I just want to talk a little bit about the same rules as last week. You know, no politics here. @nixfred: We may talk a little bit about the controversy going on, and I think that's within the boundaries of no politics. But no egos. @nixfred: You know, as I said, follow everybody back in the room. We're small, and we all have the same likes, so follow everybody back. @nixfred: And I'll shut up, Wes. Take it. @ncfrontiersman: No, yeah, yeah. Exactly. Yeah. @ncfrontiersman: Keep it positive. Let's talk about all the good going. @ncfrontiersman: There's plenty of negative noise, right? And so it's like, I don't want this to be another avenue of negativity, you know? @ncfrontiersman: I mean, there's plenty of other avenues for that. @nixfred: All right. And also, if you guys don't mind, if you could just tweet out that you're listening, and let's see if we can build this thing up. And I can't wait to hear from you right now. @nixfred: And yes, I'm speaking to you right now. I can't wait to hear your story. @ncfrontiersman: All right. Well, I guess, you know, we're coming up on 5 minutes here. We can probably go ahead and get started. @ncfrontiersman: Fred, do you want to introduce yourself? @nixfred: You bet. You bet. I'm Fred Nix on X. @nixfred: See what I did there? Happy co-host with Wes here. @nixfred: Wes is the guy that built Omastorm, which if you watch the DHH interview this week, you're going to find out that it's headed to the next version of Marchi itself. And Wes, we're going to get to that. @nixfred: I know you're a humble guy, and you don't want to bring it up, but we're going to talk about it. Last week, we had about 50 folks, and we're hoping to build it up again. @nixfred: We already talked about the house rules, no politics. And just a quick weekend and review. @nixfred: Marchi, we shipped our own kernel. DHH said Quatro passed 300,000 downloads in the month. @nixfred: The marketplace added 63 plugins in one day. The Mac fork got Touch ID working on Silicon. @nixfred: Now, Wes, I know that's near and dear to your heart. Startup meetings are the meetups this week. @nixfred: We're in London, England, Toronto, Copenhagen, and Atlanta. So let's get started, Wes. @nixfred: Back over to you. @ncfrontiersman: Yeah, wow. Yeah, it's been quite a week, for sure. Yeah, I'm Wes Grimes, North NC Frontiersman on Twitter, or X, as it is these days. @ncfrontiersman: And yeah, I'm kind of new to the Omarchy community. I've been a software developer for about 25 years. @ncfrontiersman: Got a little bored in the career, but man, Omarchy has just injected my veins with adrenaline. You know, it's just so much fun. @ncfrontiersman: And the community has been great. Yeah, so today we're going to talk about demystifying plugins. @ncfrontiersman: What is a plugin, you know, and all that. So I'm going to hand it over to Fred so he can kind of walk us through that, and then we'll kind of dive into, you know, how you get started, like building your first plugin. @nixfred: Yeah, and I see a lot of the folks out there are experts and probably know more about the plugin stuff than I do. So, you know, chime in if you got a better explanation than I do. Plugin is a change a little bit from how software runs. @nixfred: I know Marchi kind of shifted away from applications to customizing your own bar. And I've made a handful of them, and they've had some success. @nixfred: And I look out there and could name names, Tech Lite being one of them, that's really helped me move forward. And I don't claim to be a programmer. @nixfred: If you were here last week, we talked about the advantage that we believe that AI agents bring to infrastructure folks more so than programmers. If I were to be a 2X infrastructure guy, you know, I do okay at it, so 2Xing it really doesn't help me. @nixfred: But giving me the ability to just think of an idea and make it, you know, come to life in... oh, shit. Oh, sorry, my laptop blanked out. @nixfred: I thought I was going. So the agents give me the ability, if I can think of it, you know, I can make it happen. @nixfred: And I see so many times in the plugins that I release, I get folks that say, that comment below, "Can you make it do something very simple," whatever that is. And this isn't me judging them at all, but they'll say, "Can you do something very simple?" @nixfred: And I want to encourage them, like, I don't want to sound like a jerk, but kind of do it yourself a little bit. Like, there's a mindset of the past computers where we were kind of locked in, and you kind of got what you got. @nixfred: You didn't, you know, my grandmother used to say, "You get what you get, you don't pitch a fit." And for decades, we've been in this paradigm where you kind of got the software that you got because the binaries were locked down. @nixfred: And it's taken time for people to understand that. I think the newcomers to Omarchy, you're still in that mindset of downloading applications. @nixfred: Somebody made it, and I can use it. And boy, I wish it did this, but it doesn't. @nixfred: And they haven't shifted that mental model to, "I can just do it myself." So that's where the plugins for me are a big deal because my mind has switched to, "I can't do that," to, you know, anything I can dream of. @nixfred: Now, am I a kernel guy? I mean, I could poke around in a kernel, but I don't even understand it well enough to tell it what I think I need the kernel to do at a higher... I can do it at a higher level. @nixfred: But the kernel folks that get down into the details, you know, the key is to have the agent drive your idea and not limit you to a certain programming language or, you know, I always ask it, you know, "Code it in the best thing you think is possible, be it Python or Rust or whatever it is." @ncfrontiersman: Right. @nixfred: So the main thing, and then I'm going to hand it back over to you, Wes, is the main thing is don't just accept things as they are, right? If you can think about something that you want or need, do it, man. Just do it. @nixfred: And help somebody else to understand that too. Whenever you're in the comments, you see people, you know, saying things, "I can't see all of X," and none of us can. @nixfred: But if you're seeing people struggle, like, tell them, just talk to it. Help them get dictation working, and then they're off to the races. @nixfred: What do you think, Wes? @ncfrontiersman: Yeah, no, I think that's right. I love it. I mean, you know, when we first got around to computers, a lot of people had a fear, like, "I'm scared to touch it. @ncfrontiersman: I'm scared to break it," and all that kind of... I'm one of the people that never had that fear, but I knew a lot of people around me did. And I think even more so today, with, you know, agents and Omarchy and the way it's a malleable operating system, it's even less of a concern. @ncfrontiersman: Like, please break it, please touch it, please mess with it. You know, have fun with it. @ncfrontiersman: Create, you know, if it's an idea you've got and you have that agent, you can go at it. And so, like, how do you get started? @ncfrontiersman: Like, I think honestly, like, maybe the first level of, you know, customization is like just the OS and configuring. Yeah, hey, I want to have rounded corners in my windows, but that's pretty cool. @ncfrontiersman: You can do that with Omarchy. But like, you can actually start to build what you want to see. @ncfrontiersman: And so for me, for an example, like I started out, I liked the Omarchy Weather plugin, but I wanted to see like the sunset and the sunrise and the moon phase. So I opened up my agent, and I think at the time it was Codex, and I was like, "Hey, what can we do here to add those?" @ncfrontiersman: And so the cool thing is kind of built in is this idea of cloning a plugin. And so you can tell your agent, it reads in the Omarchy skill. @ncfrontiersman: It's like, "Okay, I'm going to clone this Omarchy built-in plugin." It makes a copy of it into your config that's your own that you can edit and change, right? @ncfrontiersman: And because it's not compiled, like, as your agent's making the changes, you're making it, you can kind of see it reload right before your eyes. It's almost like building a web page. @nixfred: It is. It is. @ncfrontiersman: Yeah. And so, you know, it's like, you say, "Hey," you know, you start kind of thinking about it. Where is this information I want to show available? @ncfrontiersman: Is it being fetched already? And in this case, it was using weather.in and also OpenMateo. @ncfrontiersman: And those services already provided the sunrise, sunset info. And it was really as simple as just saying, "Hey, can you also grab that information from the same call and show it on the screen?" @ncfrontiersman: And I'd like to see it as a row below the forecast row. You know, show me a little icon for the sunset and the sunrise and the moon phase. @ncfrontiersman: And this is all I'm doing. I'm just talking in natural language, explaining it, you know? @ncfrontiersman: And then, and before, and you kind of, it's like this, it's like, I don't know if y'all used to play, you know, like SimCity or something. It's like you're building this thing over time. @ncfrontiersman: You're iterating over it, making it yours, and it becomes a lot of fun. And you get to a point, and it's like, "All right, I love this plugin. @ncfrontiersman: I've used it for myself. Maybe I want to share this with other people." @ncfrontiersman: And so that's something we can talk about in a minute. But, you know, always the start is like, you don't have to build it from scratch. @ncfrontiersman: You know, that always is hard when you're having to figure out, "Oh, I don't know the shape of a plugin. I don't know what right files I need to have." @ncfrontiersman: So like, if there's a plugin that's sort of doing what you want, you can have the agent clone it, and you can start tweaking it to your liking. And then, you know, it's kind of all up from there. @ncfrontiersman: Yeah, so Fred, what about you, man? Or anything you want to ask me first? @nixfred: Yeah, so, well, I want to add on a little bit what you said about the forking. So, you know, there's no perfect or there's no completely unique ideas out there. And I like to be careful. @nixfred: A lot of folks, I look at plugins and I think, "Well," and I'll start using it. And like the Trackpad one, for example, which was made by a guy named Fanta, I believe. @nixfred: I think it's David, and I should know it better than that. I apologize if you're wrong. @nixfred: So the license and the way that open source works is that it's 100% legal and okay to go take that fork and make it your own. And once you do that, it's, you know, kind of a good thing to send back a PR if your agent kind of finds bugs. @nixfred: And so let me transition to one thing real fast is that I found Wes' plug before I became friends with him and before I followed him and before I, you know, before we started talking. And the first thing I did was I did fork it. @nixfred: And Wes, I think I actually emailed or DM'd you and said, "Do you mind if I fork this?" You know, out of politeness. @ncfrontiersman: Yeah, yeah. @nixfred: And he said, "Certainly." But, you know, Wes has come a long ways with his Omastorm. And this week, DHH called him out specifically on a podcast with ZeroXSero. @nixfred: I'm not exactly sure how to say that, but his at is @zeroxsero. Very intelligent young man. @nixfred: And I just want to play a little clip. Let me know immediately if you can hear it okay about DHH in the interview talking about Wes' plugin. @nixfred: Here we go. Track two. @ZryMiller: Guys, a tweet I just saw this morning. He's been working on this thing called Omastorm. So it tracks storms going over your area. @ZryMiller: And he put it into the weather widget that we have in Omarchy. It looks incredible. @ZryMiller: We're going to ship it in the next version. But here's a guy who just went like, "Well, I like storms. @ZryMiller: I want to see the storms. I want to see this lightning. @ZryMiller: I want to see where it's moving." He would not have done that before. @ZryMiller: We have, actually, this is outdated now. A week ago, it was 3,000 plugins created for Omarchy in three weeks. @ZryMiller: Once you've lived that, working with other people and trying to coordinate. @nixfred: Oh, you're not hearing it? @ncfrontiersman: No. @nixfred: Oh, all right. Well, I'll do better next time. @ncfrontiersman: That's okay. @nixfred: And I'll reload. Sorry about that, everybody. @ncfrontiersman: That's all good. @nixfred: I'll post it in the chat. @ncfrontiersman: Yeah, yeah, y'all can watch it. We'll figure out how to do that next time. But it was cool. @ncfrontiersman: Somebody shared it first with me and was like, "Hey, did you, maybe it was Tundy that did." I can't remember, but. @nixfred: Tundy, my man. @ncfrontiersman: Yeah. @nixfred: He's already started a, I believe he's doing the London meetup and doing amazing, like doing, it's blowing up. So good on you, Tundy. @ncfrontiersman: Yeah, yeah. And I think what DHH was really just saying is like, it's a cool platform. And if you have a good idea and something that you love personally, get out there and make it, you know, and share it. @ncfrontiersman: And that's really kind of the point there. So. @nixfred: Fantastic. @ncfrontiersman: Yeah, it was a neat little surprise to wake up to. But it ain't about me. I mean, I would love to see everybody on this call, you know, have that opportunity. @ncfrontiersman: So I think it's just a lot of fun when your work is shared and people find value in it. And this is like the barrier to entry here is so much lower than it used to be. @nixfred: Oh, man. Oh, man. Hey, Wes, you mind if we kind of switch topics a little bit? @ncfrontiersman: Sure. @nixfred: So I want to talk about the elephant in the room this week. And that is all of the Arch Linux crowd that's very angry about their own walled garden of sorts coming down. And Linux has been tough to use for quite a long time. @nixfred: And for some people, it kind of became their identity. Running Arch, ironically, was kind of a badge of honor because it meant you were willing to learn the hard stuff and break stuff. @nixfred: But Omarchy really changed that equation. And the barrier to entry is lowering. @nixfred: And whether you already know Linux well enough to survive Arch install, the barrier isn't any longer your technology ability, but it's really become curiosity, persistence, and the desire to just freaking do it. So that opens the door to a completely different set of group. @nixfred: And some of those Arch Linux guys that are hating on Omarchy, some of that pushback comes from the feeling that something that they would belong to a small club is becoming really accessible to everyone. And from their perspective, it's kind of a loss. @nixfred: And people tend to react to loss in one of two ways. They adapt and move forward, or they find a reason to rebuild those walls around a smaller group. @nixfred: And I think you can see a little bit of both of that happening because some of those guys see Omarchy and think, "Awesome, more people are coming to Linux." But then others are creating a new badge of honor around not needing Omarchy. @nixfred: And the club becomes smaller again. And now the cool kids are the ones who know better, that run something harder, that configure everything themselves, or can tell you all the reasons that Omarchy is crap and doing it all wrong. @nixfred: And so we're talking about the same wall again, but a different garden. But there's a much more interesting move available to those people. @nixfred: If Omarchy made that layer of Linux that was difficult dramatically easier, then those smart people should go push and find the next hardest layer. Maybe push into the kernel, maybe solve power management, prove Wayland. @nixfred: Let's make gaming better. And if being difficult was part of their identity, great. @nixfred: It's almost like an endless supply of difficult things to fix. So Omarchy didn't take away the frontier. @nixfred: It just moved it forward. So what are your thoughts on that, Wes? @ncfrontiersman: Yeah, no, I 100% agree. I think, number one, I bet if we got a chance to chat with them and show them, they might actually change their minds. Because a lot of times people just kind of read scanned headlines and, you know, they jump into their sides or whatever. @ncfrontiersman: And they miss the nuance. But I would love to see every single one of those Arch people, you know, come on in and, you know, let's just make a big tent, right? @ncfrontiersman: Let's see what we can do to, because there are so many hard challenges yet to be solved. And we need people that have built up that scar tissue. @ncfrontiersman: They've built up those muscles of sticking out a problem that's really hard until it's solved. And I think that those skills apply even more now than ever. @ncfrontiersman: You know, even though AI can generate the code, that doesn't mean it's doing everything. You should never outsource your thinking to it, right? @ncfrontiersman: Like, it's just a, it's just kind of a levels the playing field in some ways, but again, you still need to have that agency. And so I would love to see those folks, you know, come over. @ncfrontiersman: And if not, that's cool too, whatever, you know? @nixfred: Yeah, you can lead a horse to water kind of thing. But at the end, as DHH says over and over, we are going to win. And we're going to beat, you know, trillion-dollar companies. @nixfred: And, you know, it's just amazing that all of these things have kind of come together. Any one of them alone, you know, AI by itself wasn't doing it. @nixfred: Omarchy before AI wasn't doing it. @ncfrontiersman: Yeah. @nixfred: But, you know, the quality of people that I've met, some of the people that I know that I've known for 20 years that are on this chat right now, you know, it's just amazing. Wes, what's next on our agenda, man? @ncfrontiersman: Yeah, well, before we hop into building the interview, I wanted to hear a little bit about your first plugin and how that went. @nixfred: All right. So that's a really good point. And, you know, earlier I was saying that you want to talk about, talk to people in the comments about, you know, all you got to do is just think it and dream it. @nixfred: And I was just thinking, when I first installed Omarchy, not to be an asshole, but I'm pretty good at the AI stuff, you know, more than if I go to Publix and go to the grocery store. Likely, I'm probably the best AI guy in the grocery store. @nixfred: I'm not egotistical, but there are many people on this chat right now that I know by name that are better than me. However, I'm okay at it. @nixfred: So when I first got Omarchy and I thought, "Okay, I can make changes," even I, as an AI understander, still wasn't thinking big enough. So the jump for somebody that's doing both, that they're learning Omarchy and learning AI is a big wall. @nixfred: Because to your question, what was my first plugin? My very first thing, and you're going to laugh at me, was I took the calendar date, the one that at the very center that we all have, and I added a graph bar that told me what percentage of the year we are through. @nixfred: And that was it. @ncfrontiersman: Nice. @nixfred: So just for your knowledge, we are 71.94% through the year. @ncfrontiersman: Goodness. @nixfred: And I thought, "Wow, that's crazy." And even that blew me away. But the crazy thing is, is that once you understand that anything's possible, from there, my next plugin was bigger. @nixfred: And from there, my next plugin was bigger. @ncfrontiersman: Yeah. @nixfred: And from there, you know, Infomarchy started out as an idea just for me, and it was crap. And then some 15 people have started contributing and finding stuff, again, that I had no idea about. And getting pretty technical in the weeds, like Tech Luddite sent over some stuff that I read. @nixfred: And I'm like, "I don't know what the hell he's talking about, but he's smart." So, you know, and don't take that as I'm an, I guess I am an idiot for just accepting it. @nixfred: But, you know, there's things that are out of my grasp that are still out of my grasp. And I rely on the people that I know and love and getting the love to help me. @nixfred: So my first plugin was not even a plugin. It was just to edit the calendar that's at the top of your bar that shows the date to say what percentage of the year we're through. @nixfred: And we're through 71.95% of the year. And the tweak that I did was I told it to do two decimal points. @nixfred: And I was like, "Wow, it did it." @ncfrontiersman: So take a step back. So you've installed Omarchy. You wanted to add, you came up with the idea. @ncfrontiersman: What did you do? Open up terminal, pull up what agent did you use? @ncfrontiersman: And did you say, "Hey, clone this plugin?" Or how did that? @nixfred: I've kind of, before Omarchy, you know, and I would look to build things, I built a bunch of stuff. And a lot of my stuff is infrastructure. And you can go to nixfred.com and see all the crap that I've built. @nixfred: And so that was where my focus was. But I didn't really have an operating system. @nixfred: And I was doing it for a Mac. So I was kind of held behind, you know, the Mac, you know, there's a lot of talk about agents really aren't that good on a Mac. @nixfred: And they're kind of not. So when Omarchy came out, I kind of, it took me a couple of days to kind of understand what it was. @nixfred: And I was doing things for my own benefit and things that I liked. And then, you know, Atmos came out by a good friend of mine. @nixfred: And I was able to submit some PRs to that. And then I just started helping other people with their things. @nixfred: And I've been accused of having a little bit of an eye for visualizations. And what I found is that if I like it, somebody else does. @nixfred: And I think the second thing I did was tell it to, and don't hate me for this, but make it look more like a Mac and make the Alt Tab more like a Mac. And then pretty early in, I said, "If you can just show me what's on my iPhone for iMessages, just like if I could just see it, that'd be really cool." @nixfred: And I was very happy that I was able to see it. And then it grew from there. @nixfred: And so BurnBar, which I just released 2.0 out, if you want to check it out, it's a big, big improvement in my opinion. But all my stuff is for me. @nixfred: If I need it, I build it. And I hope that when I put it out, that other people need it as well. @nixfred: And it turns out that occasionally it resonates. @ncfrontiersman: Yeah, yeah, totally. Totally. Yeah, because I mean, it just seems to go better if you end up taking something you've built for yourself that you love, that you take time and care in building, then trying to figure out, "I wonder what plugin would go viral." @ncfrontiersman: Or, "I wonder what plugin everybody could use." Like, just focus on what you know. @ncfrontiersman: And then I guarantee there's going to be other people out there that like the same stuff and would benefit from you sharing, you know, what you're doing. So. @nixfred: Exactly. And DHH talks a lot about how we've got to get capitalism involved and how the old Linux guard was anti-capitalism. And then they were surprised that nobody would give them money because they were directly a threat to what, you know, Linux was doing. @nixfred: Why would you give money to people that, you know, their webpage says down with capitalism? So what happened, you know, what DHH says is build what you think is good for you. @nixfred: And, you know, the things that matter to you probably matter to somebody else. @ncfrontiersman: Yeah, yeah, for sure. All right, so let's fast forward. So talking about this idea of we've come up with an idea, we've made a plugin, now we want to share it. @nixfred: Sure. @ncfrontiersman: Now we want to get it, you know, we want to get it out there for other people to try. Like, to start with, you don't have to get it published in the plugin directory. That's a great place for people to discover and find it. @ncfrontiersman: Like, it's not one of those things like with Apple, right? Or, you know, other operating systems where you have to have it in the store and get approved. @ncfrontiersman: Like, anybody can take the command, Omarchy plugin command, point it at a GitHub URL and install it, which is pretty cool. @nixfred: Yeah, and so what I used to do was, you know, I don't know, I'm sure raise your hand or clap or whatever. If you kind of, before Omarchy, we're running out of things to build on AI. And that kind of sounds crazy. @nixfred: And, you know, we're just looking for that next dopamine hit. You know, AI kind of has replaced the doom scrolling for the folks that get onto it. @nixfred: So it became a thing for me to fork things and then make it my own. @nixfred: And so I kind of had that natural thought process. And so it really, all the things it feels like in the past year and a half with Claude code and seeing it from before it was publicly released all the way to where it is now at 2.1.200 and something, I think it is, you know, we've come a long ways. @nixfred: And the tools are getting better. And so, you know, I certainly encourage people to fork things. @nixfred: There's probably 30 forks that I've made that there's no reason to publish because it's just for me. I am a good citizen. @nixfred: And I send back a PR if I think it might help the overall project. But, you know, forking things is a great way to do it. @nixfred: And you're talking about how do you get it out there? There's really five different things you can do. @nixfred: Number one is you just keep it to yourself. And that's fine if it works for you. @nixfred: Number two is you can go to X and you can, you know, start publishing out there and code out in the open and let other people see it. The third thing you can do is you can build your own website and kind of host your own plugin library. @nixfred: And I've done that. But really, that was at Omarchy.nixfred.com. @nixfred: The only reason that I did that was really to, as a disaster recovery for me and just kind of a one place I can go to install things for a new box. And I'm also working on a way to, I think the Omarchy crew is going to beat me to it. @nixfred: But there's some things in the way of fleet management and being able to recreate boxes on the fly. We added a piece of that import-export to Atmos, if you've seen that. @nixfred: But so we got keep it to yourself. We got show it on X. @nixfred: We've got make your own website that publishes your own plugins. The fourth one being, you know, advertise it and submit it to the official plugin site by hackers. @nixfred: And, you know, he does an amazing job. And the fifth thing is, and I don't know if this is even popular, put it on Facebook or whatever. @nixfred: But for those of you, if you're looking for me on Facebook, you're not going to find anything. I went to Facebook headquarters and sold them some storage way back in the day. @nixfred: And they pulled me aside and said, "What's your user account here?" And I told them. @nixfred: And they told me and showed me all the things that they know about me. And I deleted it that afternoon. @ncfrontiersman: Ooh, yeah. Yeah, that's always scary. Yeah, so yeah, so you don't have to share it if you don't want to. @ncfrontiersman: You can share it on X. Like, you don't have to publish it to the plugin directory. @ncfrontiersman: But like, let's say you come up with a cool idea and you do want to share it. Like, the idea is there's really good docs, right? @ncfrontiersman: Like, you point your agent at the plugin, you know, how to build a plugin, how to publish a plugin, and say, "Hey, step me through doing this the right way." And there's going to be a process where you open an issue up on the plugin repo and you have to fill out a couple of questions. @ncfrontiersman: Well, you don't have to. The agent can do it. @ncfrontiersman: And then there are some things that get validated. So like, for example, for me, with Omastorm, my plugin has the quick shell, like pop over window, but it also has this engine that runs in the background. @ncfrontiersman: And so I submitted it and actually appreciate it. They did the scan and they said, "Well, your engine might accidentally download more files than needed and cause like people's disks to fill up." @ncfrontiersman: And so it was really good feedback. And so I went back and I made that fix. @ncfrontiersman: And then I, you know, you edit the issue. And then they do another scan and come back and say, "All right, yeah, I see you fixed that. @ncfrontiersman: It looks good." And so there's, someone has created a skill, I think, that makes this a little easier. @ncfrontiersman: But if you think about this stuff at the beginning when you're building it and you tell your agent, "Hey, I'm going to be publishing this at some point. Let's keep the requirements in mind," you know, as we do it, then it's a lot easier before you build a bunch of things that will never get accepted. @ncfrontiersman: So, and again, you don't have to publish it to that directory if you don't want to. But I think it's worth it. @ncfrontiersman: It's not a lot of effort to get it done. @nixfred: And the other thing is, is that, you know, you can go ahead. @nixfred: My son's calling me and family comes first. @ncfrontiersman: Okay, yeah, yeah. So, but yeah, I mean, yeah, the idea of pushing out there. And so, and if some of y'all are new to building software, once you start building something and sharing it, you kind of got to think about it like you've got customers in a way. @ncfrontiersman: And think about them. Think about, you know, like my time in tech support and being on the front lines for years and hearing all the issues kind of gave me that empathy for people using the software that I was involved in. @ncfrontiersman: And so you do need to kind of think about, "Hey, I've, like with Omastorm, I've built something. It's working a certain way. @ncfrontiersman: And people are liking it." I would hate to then all of a sudden rip a feature out from under them or completely change the way the config works and then everybody's config breaks. @ncfrontiersman: So you kind of got to keep those things in mind too as you move forward. But you don't have to, you know, go crazy. @ncfrontiersman: And I would say start with something small that you personally have found use out of. Because an agent can write the code, but it is not going to know your intention for what you're building. @ncfrontiersman: And it's not going to do as good a job of truly exercising it in the real way that it would be used. And so there's a lot of value in just building it, you know, running it, clicking it, going all over crazy with it, trying to break it. @ncfrontiersman: Like that kind of stuff, it really adds a lot of value to a polished product. And thinking about, "Hey, I might be building this on personally, like an Omarchy Mac install, but somebody else might be on a, you know, an x86 base machine. @ncfrontiersman: It should work in both." Because like with Omastorm, when I first built it, I actually was, I didn't have an Omarchy on a laptop. @ncfrontiersman: I had it on a VM that was on an x86. And so the Rust binary that was built was just x86. @ncfrontiersman: And I had people say, "Hey, I can't install this on, you know, the Arch one, what, you know, the Arm64, you know, but I did have my agent build it and it worked." And I'm like, "Oh, that's cool." @ncfrontiersman: And then so took that information in and now I'm producing, you know, an x86 and the Arm64. So these are the kind of things you just got to kind of think about as you're building it out. @ncfrontiersman: But yeah, are you back? @nixfred: Yeah, I'm back. And one thing that, you know, as tokens get more expensive, and, you know, I don't mean that $200 is going up. I mean, you know, less and less. @nixfred: Inflation, I suppose, applied somehow. One thing that I've been burned a couple of times and really ended up wasting tokens and maybe some time is I'll build, start building something and then, and I'll tell my agent, "Go look and see if somebody, you know, wait a minute. @nixfred: Go look and see if somebody else has already done this better." And it comes back and says, "15 people have tried this and there's 17 that are better than you." @nixfred: And so I'm like, "Damn it, I wasted tokens. I wasted time." @nixfred: So, you know, wrap that back to the fork conversation. Fork it down, find the best one, fork it down and customize it to your own needs. @ncfrontiersman: Yeah, yeah. In engineering and software, we'd call it like prior art. @nixfred: Yeah, yeah. @ncfrontiersman: You know, and so before agents and all, you know, you'd be coming up with a solution. And the first thing you do is you go figure out, has anybody done anything similar? You know, can I take the learnings that they, you know, had from it and apply that here? @ncfrontiersman: So that's always a good first step for sure. @ZryMiller: Yeah, and AI agents will gaslight you into making you think that your idea is the most unique idea out there. And then I've pushed back and been like, "Okay, hey, let's just see if anyone else has had this idea." And then like you said, Fred, it's like, "Oh, yep, there's 30 other applications that already do this and it's better than the process that I showed you." @ZryMiller: So I think the thing I'm struggling with is I have an application I'm planning to launch on Windows, but like I keep messing around with it and finding bugs. And I don't know when the right time to actually, you know, launch it actually is to like have people, you know, like I'm, I figured my thought would be is when I'm using it every day then and not running into constant bugs, that's when I launch it. @ZryMiller: But I don't know if I'll ever reach that point, you know? So I don't know if you guys can talk to about that. @nixfred: Yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean, I would say number one, try to keep the feature set as small as possible to begin with. Don't be, you know, don't build, you know, all 15 features of what it is. And then you're, then it's like playing whack-a-mole. @nixfred: You fix one, the other one breaks, right? @ZryMiller: Yeah, now I'm way too deep in the features now. @nixfred: I hear you. It's just like talking to a human employee. If you spend three minutes with them and tell them what you want, you're going to get three minutes of instruction results. @nixfred: If you spend, you know, a day with that employee and really teach them what you want, you get better results. It's no different. @nixfred: I treat Larry like he's literally, I mean, I start to kind of apply human attributes to him. And I've kind of encouraged him to, you know, push back on me and be snarky. @ncfrontiersman: Larry's your AI assistant? @nixfred: Yeah, Larry's. And there's a lot about how I built Larry at how.nixfred.com. And Wes, tell me if you're sick of the self. @ncfrontiersman: You get one more and then. @nixfred: I don't care if nobody goes to it, but if it'll help somebody, then good for them. @ncfrontiersman: Yeah, no, it's all good, man. Cool. Yeah, so Zach, what's the name of your plugin? @ZryMiller: Oh, so right, basically I have it on Windows right now. I don't, it's called Soto. So it's a voice transcription and it's not a harness. @ZryMiller: It's like an agent management. So you can manage threads or have multiple terminals open to work with agents in. @ZryMiller: And it's just a nicer UI. @ncfrontiersman: Okay. @ZryMiller: So if anyone's familiar with T3 Code, it'd be similar to that. And I've built a lot of features similar to what T3 Code has, but I also have built-in transcription, which I've, that I've used a lot. So similar to Whisper Flow, but my plan is to port it over to Omarchy because right now it's an Electron shell, but I want to build it more native in a more native language to Omarchy so that it, I don't know, I see Omarchy developers as being preferring things that @ZryMiller: are customizable. So I want the app to feel that way. So that's kind of what I'm planning to do next, but I'm just trying to get the Windows version up to my standard. @ZryMiller: Then I'll release that and then start working on the Omarchy version. @nixfred: That's awesome, bro. @ncfrontiersman: Well, I think that kind of leads us in to open it up to some Q&A. So we're going to do, we got to keep it, we got a lot of people here. So we got to keep it to two minutes if we can per person. @ncfrontiersman: If you got a question or you just want to talk a little bit about what you're building, that's fine. Just raise your hand and then I will make you or Fred will make you a speaker. @ncfrontiersman: And then, yeah, we'll kind of try to get through the room. So who would like to go first or second? @nixfred: Follow everybody, follow everybody. And I'll stick around after it's over to chat if anybody wants to chat, but Wes, you pick, man. @ncfrontiersman: All right, looks like David is up. Let me approve David here. @ncfrontiersman: Let's see, did that work? @ncfrontiersman: David, I just accepted. Very good. @ncfrontiersman: So what's up, David? What's going on? @nixfred: Unmute. @ncfrontiersman: Let's see. @nixfred: Let's see if we can unmute him. I don't think I can. @ncfrontiersman: All right, I might have to come back to you, David. Let's see. @nixfred: Yeah, who's next? @ncfrontiersman: Anybody else? @nixfred: If you want to speak, raise your hand and. @NoPowerPoints: Sorry about that. Can you hear me now? @ncfrontiersman: Oh, there we go. @nixfred: Awesome, David. Welcome. @NoPowerPoints: I'm so sorry, guys. I apologize. So I've been following them. @NoPowerPoints: I was using Omarchy probably right before Quattro, maybe about four or five months. Quattro kind of like just opened up the door with the harnesses coming and the skills to take a look at, you know, doing some things. @NoPowerPoints: So written a couple of plugins, got them published. One of them's called HyperTile Equalizer. @NoPowerPoints: The other one's called GitHub Repo Tracker. And there's a few of those out there. @NoPowerPoints: So it's kind of like one of those things where you build something and then somebody else is already working on it. And you're like, "Oh, man, you know, I wish I'd known about that." @NoPowerPoints: But I got the experience, which is cool. Question I have for you on the Omarchy plugin development stuff. @NoPowerPoints: I mean, I've gone through it a couple of times. Works really well. @NoPowerPoints: It takes a while to get through the approval process because the agents, you know, kind of go do their thing. And then it might take a little bit of time to get a notification that you got a security issue or something like that needs to be fixed. @NoPowerPoints: I'm all cool with that. I mean, it's cool, but I really like to know like what is the shortcut to like pre-qualify or validate my own code before I submit it. @ncfrontiersman: Wonderful question. And what I've done is I've had my agent go, because that, most of that information is like in the source code for the Omarchy plugin directory. And it's like, "Hey, go figure out the checks it's going to run ahead of time, right?" @ncfrontiersman: And then look at what I have here and tell me where there's going to be issues. So yeah, I think there could be an opportunity here and people on here that are involved with the Omarchy team and stuff, y'all can correct me, but I think having an official skill or something that we could pull in and use, like before we even get started building the plugin or even after, it's like, how can we get to automatic, you know, almost automatic approval here or at least, you know, @ncfrontiersman: cut that friction down? Because I do agree. It's kind of like, you know, if you haven't gone through it, it's like, man, I wish I would have known that ahead of time or whatever. @ncfrontiersman: So there is some things you can do though, right, to have it go and pull that repo down and look at it. You say, "Hey, scan over the prior issues, you know, that have had security audits. @ncfrontiersman: What kind of things did they fail on?" You know, are we going to hit those issues? @NoPowerPoints: The one thing that is also just a little, I mean, like the first one was always painful, right? The second one was easier. On the second one, I think one of the tricks, I don't know if it worked or not, it felt like it did, was to say, "Okay, here's the plugin developers guide. @NoPowerPoints: Here's the, you know, I grabbed anything I could from a link standpoint to just that was relevant. It was just a couple, but it was like, okay. @NoPowerPoints: Relative to the context, let's make sure we're following the developer guideline and the submission guidelines and let AI just try to, you know, reassess it on its own. That seemed to work pretty well. @NoPowerPoints: The one thing that is a little bit of a gotcha is like sometimes the agent will, like you've got to, you do your initial submission and it's like super sweet to just have it go do it. It's a little scary to be quite honest because it's like using a credential and stuff, but it does a good job of doing that first submission. @NoPowerPoints: But then when there is a feedback that comes, you know, from hand course like, you know, automated, whatever, then you're like, "Okay, I got to go fix this." There have been times where it's like the solution is actually to go edit the anchor point in the submission versus just continuing on to say, "Okay, I fixed it and let it go forward." @NoPowerPoints: It's like there's a specific sequence of things that has to occur for submissions versus verifications. Does that make sense? @ncfrontiersman: Yeah, so one of the things that checks is the SHA, right? The unique identifier for the commit, because they want to make sure that the main commit that you have on your main branch matches the one that you had them verify. And so kind of the trigger to have it check again is to edit that issue and update that. @ncfrontiersman: I haven't found any issue if I just tell it to edit the issue and update that. Like it seems to always pick it back up. @NoPowerPoints: Yeah. @NoPowerPoints: No, it's a good, it's one of those things that's kind of a learned thing. And it's also an experience thing. @NoPowerPoints: I'm not as experienced with Git as you guys are. So it's like, "Okay, I'm trying to get my head around the plugin development, the languages, blah, blah, blah, what the AI is doing." @NoPowerPoints: And then also what is the Git and GitHub specific stuff need too. So a good skill for that would be awesome. @NoPowerPoints: If it doesn't exist, it might exist and I'm just not finding it or using it correctly. But it's been a blissful experience by comparison to other things I've done. @NoPowerPoints: So I'm a happy camper and I'm going to let other people bring up their issues and stuff. So thank you very much for the inputs there. @ncfrontiersman: Yeah, thanks, David. Appreciate it, man. All right, let's see. @ncfrontiersman: We got. @nixfred: Let me throw one more thing in on the submitting a plugin and little tips and tricks. So the first thing is don't submit it the first day that you build it. Even if you're happy with it, you're going to find something that you like to make it a little better. @nixfred: So give yourself a week and work on it and sleep on it. I find that I make some of my biggest breakthroughs and ideas when I get the freak off the machine and walk the dog. @nixfred: The second thing is that open your head up to allow PRs and let other people work on it, right? @nixfred: So let other people, let other people join in the fun. And then the last thing I'd say is bring your patience because Handcore has got a lot on his plate and he, you know, he's got a lot on his plate. @nixfred: And so those are the three things that I would say. Martin. @ncfrontiersman: Yep, Martin. @nixfred: We got a new speaker. @m_tolhuijs: Yeah, hi guys. Hear me well? @nixfred: Yes, sir. @m_tolhuijs: Okay, cool, cool, cool. First of all, like awesome to be here and like awesome to see like what Omarchy has unlocked for so many people. This whole conversation that I've been following here like leads up basically to something that I wanted to share here in the group. @m_tolhuijs: Like I built a couple of plugins, I think like. @m_tolhuijs: And like when I was seeing the marketplace and the issue list that. @ncfrontiersman: Go ahead. @m_tolhuijs: Is it bad? @ncfrontiersman: Yep, we're good. @m_tolhuijs: Okay, okay. So I saw the issue list, right? That Handcore is processing right now. @m_tolhuijs: And I felt like, like, wait, this, this, we need to help him here. And you guys already have been talking about like the validation, like the stress that comes along with submitting your plugin and your work towards this whole process. @m_tolhuijs: And this is exactly why I built like a tool called OmarKit, which basically does the whole marketplace pipeline locally on your machine. @m_tolhuijs: So it tests those things that is doing. And it also comes like with some extra tools that I use personally, like because like I saw Handcore's list, but I also know like what AI is doing and like what the stuff is that I always review on. @m_tolhuijs: So something that I wanted to do with OmarKit is like building the same test-driven development that I'm using to, or that I'm used to with. I'm a Larva guy. @m_tolhuijs: So I wanted to have like something that can tell the AI, no, this is not well, this is not good. Yeah. @m_tolhuijs: So also it comes like with a verify command. It comes with like an inspect command. @m_tolhuijs: Right now I'm building a run command and that's actually, I think the naming is a bit wrong because like what I'm actually trying to do here, it's already released, but it's like a kind of an adapter that, first of all, it's like, it's handy for Handcore because Handcore always checks on like, what does your plugin do? Like, does it create a memory leak? @m_tolhuijs: Does it do like all the freaky stuff, right? Like the run is like a kind of block, like an adapter that is attached to your plugin that makes sure that it cannot happen. @m_tolhuijs: Those kind of things, OmarKit does. And like the subtitle before was like, it's a safe place to run your plugin and to test your plugin and to see if it's up for validation or, yeah, for the marketplace. @m_tolhuijs: But right now it's actually, it's doing way more than that. So yeah, check it out if you have these kind of things, like a skill. @m_tolhuijs: I saw like the skills coming up as Markdown files everywhere, but, and they are really, really nice, by the way. There's a lot of work being done there and I think that's really, really amazing. @m_tolhuijs: Yeah, the only thing is like we all know, right, with AI, like skills go so far. Like I had so many countless, so many moments that I said, did you completely ignore what I just said here? @m_tolhuijs: Yeah, I cannot count those ones. But so that's why OmarKit exists. @m_tolhuijs: Check it out. Reach out to me. @m_tolhuijs: I'm building it as we speak and it's really aimed to tackle these kind of problems you have. @ncfrontiersman: Wonderful. @m_tolhuijs: To make you feel more secure and more, yeah, yeah, that you can step up and like, let's bring this up. @ncfrontiersman: I appreciate you building that and sharing. I think that'll be helpful. You know, something I was working on recently is like this idea of running it locally while you're testing it without having to install it fully. @ncfrontiersman: And so, because I'm like, you know, I've done a lot of web dev and the idea of you have hot reloading and stuff where you can run it and see the web page reload while you're making the changes. And so having a way, like what I've done is just a Mees task where it's like Mees dev in it temporarily and like simlinks it to the plugins directory and then installs it and runs it. @ncfrontiersman: And then when you kill the command, it removes it. So having something like that, I think would also be pretty helpful. @ncfrontiersman: So maybe you could look into something like that or I could contribute to it, but. @m_tolhuijs: Yeah, yeah. It's still not a P1, but it works. I saw already some guy from the community testing it out and it worked for him. @m_tolhuijs: So that was good to see. But yeah, it's aimed to do exactly that and like to be like a hard guard for AI. @m_tolhuijs: Like, okay, this is what I'm building right now. Obviously doesn't match the criteria that the marketplace is having. @ncfrontiersman: Wonderful. All right. Well, hey, I'm going to give some time for other folks, but feel free to share in the chat and we'll catch you next time. @ncfrontiersman: Thanks, man. All right, Colin, I think you're up next. @nixfred: And hang tight, Thundy. Colin's next. @cfaulkingham: Thanks, Wes. Hey, I just wanted to, a couple of things real quick. There is a skill out there. @cfaulkingham: If you go to GitHub and you search Omarchy security skill, it comes up. And I'm not the developer of it, but I used it on two of my plugins with great success. @cfaulkingham: The user is JankEESVW. And he's actually got another great tool. @cfaulkingham: I think it was through him. Let me see if I can find it. @cfaulkingham: It's OV or OmaVM. And it's a tool that allows you to spin up Omarchy distros on Omarchy. @cfaulkingham: And you can use it to test your plugin. @ncfrontiersman: Oh, okay. @cfaulkingham: Yeah. So those are two things that really helped me quite a lot. Of course, I've made a couple of plugins and I've only published a couple of them on the Omarchy plugins directory. @cfaulkingham: The others are on my GitHub. But, you know, I didn't want to specifically plug myself here. @cfaulkingham: I just wanted to tell you guys about the skill, which is very, very useful. And it got me through the pains of testing them out before I published them and saved me a lot of headache. @cfaulkingham: Because the first one I published, I just went through this constant, you know, the automated, you know, CI throwing back all the issues. @cfaulkingham: So, and I started, there was a conversation last week about possibly working on a local AI, doing a fine tune. And I actually started working on that. @cfaulkingham: And actually, I used that tool, the OmaVM tool to sort of test it out. @cfaulkingham: And if anybody's interested in working with me on that, it's currently in its state as a LoRA adapter. And it's kind of a difficult nut to crack for the, if you wanted it for widespread usage to have a local AI on your machine because, you know, you have to run on a potato. @cfaulkingham: So there's not many models out there that run well on a potato. So I did find one that was a very, you know, by LiquidAI that was apparently pretty good. @cfaulkingham: And for my basic testing, it's not bad. But I started out as just doing the training, the fine tuning, just to replace the default Omarchy skill. @cfaulkingham: And I want to let you guys know it's a lot more difficult than I thought it was going to be. You can certainly, you know, fine tune it and get it to do some stuff without the skill. @cfaulkingham: It's very easy to overfit. @ncfrontiersman: Yeah. @cfaulkingham: So it would, the effort, if anybody's still interested in pursuing it, I don't know from last week, it would take a lot more input and training data to get it to be worthwhile. I don't know. @ncfrontiersman: Yeah, yeah. I hear you. I mean, there's just so many man-hours that are going into those models. @ncfrontiersman: It's kind of hard to compete with that. @cfaulkingham: Yeah, but I kind of set up an automated, you know, I had Grok sort of just, you know, doing automated runs and, you know, train, figure out what it needs to do to change, you know, to make it better. And, you know, you can pretty much automate the whole thing, but it's not, unless you have a lot of human input on the fine tuning training data, it's probably not going to be very good. @ncfrontiersman: So, yeah. Well, hey, thanks for chiming in, Colin. I'm going to move on to Thundy next. @thetundeo: Evening, gentlemen. Can you hear me? @nixfred: Yes, we hear you great, Thundy. I got to know, man, how did the London meetup go? You're the leader. @nixfred: I want to hear more about it. We're trying to build one plan and you had great success. @nixfred: So what's the secret, man? @thetundeo: Oh, the secret, I wish I could tell you, but we've not held it yet. It's happening on Thursday. @nixfred: Oh, look at me. @ncfrontiersman: Well, then prophetically, what is the secret? @nixfred: Well, you've already got more people there than prompt committed. So what's the secret? @thetundeo: Secret, honestly, I just did it. I didn't overthink it. I saw the post from DHH where he exchanged a WhatsApp message with, who was it, Toby, when they were raising funds for OmaCon. @ncfrontiersman: Yeah. @thetundeo: Immediately I saw his post. I was driving, I just parked the car and I called my friend. I said, there's this thing. @thetundeo: He hadn't even heard of it. He said, Oma what? @thetundeo: And I just said, you just trust me. You give me a venue, I'll sort everything out. @thetundeo: And they happily gave us the venue. @ncfrontiersman: Wow. You just did it. You didn't think about it. @ncfrontiersman: That's the motto, right? @thetundeo: Yeah, which is very unlike me. @ncfrontiersman: Hey, that's awesome. @nixfred: Changing people's lives. @ncfrontiersman: That's right. @thetundeo: I had a quick question for you, Wes. This relates to a question you asked earlier today about the Rust repo. @ncfrontiersman: Yes. @thetundeo: I just wanted to ask if you could explain to us, because when I saw it, what came to mind was maybe Wes wants examples so you could steer your agent if you're building anything or implementing anything in Rust to say, follow these principles. I assume, but I didn't know. I just wanted to ask you if that was the case. @ncfrontiersman: Yeah, because, you know, I've been doing software 25 plus years professionally, you know, and so I know a lot, but Rust was one of those things I never touched. It's newer. And so my whole thing was, you know, the way I approach things when I learn new languages is I go to find those exemplary code bases that not just look pretty, but that are performant, that have worked well. @ncfrontiersman: In this case, open source, and it seems to be a healthy, you know, repo. And so the idea was, yeah, I want to point my agents at it to say, hey, go look at this code base, pull out the patterns that are being used in the structure. @ncfrontiersman: Where do you find, you know, things that work well and things that have been pain issues? And then the idea from that is kind of to distill it down into a style with the style being examples of code. @ncfrontiersman: I find that when you write a lot of rules in these agent docs to say, you know, do this, don't do that, it doesn't work as well as literally just having code examples. So like in the rails world, show me an example of a well-structured controller model, right, and views. @ncfrontiersman: Don't tell me the right things to do in those. Just show me good examples. @ncfrontiersman: And it tends to follow that better. @thetundeo: Understood. Thank you very much. That's everything. @thetundeo: I don't want to hoard anybody's time. Thank you so much. @ncfrontiersman: Yeah, thank you. Good to hear everything is moving forward and good luck this week. Anybody else want to speak? @ncfrontiersman: We've got time for probably two more people and then we'll call. @nixfred: Is Heath out there? @ncfrontiersman: Oh, it looks like Hancour has hopped in. You want to give him? @nixfred: Yeah, let's talk to him first. @ncfrontiersman: You got anything to say or you just want to hang out? @nixfred: Request to speak, Han. There it is. I got it. @nixfred: Request to speak, Hancour. And Heath, hang on for just one second. @nixfred: Hancour, if you want to speak, go ahead and request to speak and we'll move on to Heath. Everybody likes super sexy hardware and we want the biggest GPUs. @nixfred: Heath has been a buddy of mine for 20 years and he, I can't say where he works or what he does, not trying to be cool, that's legit, but he gets to touch the big stuff. Heath, welcome to the show, man. @nixfred: Tell us about what you work on. @MuchmoreIT: Hey guys, how are you? @nixfred: Doing fantastic, man. @MuchmoreIT: Yeah, so this week has been an interesting Fred. You and I were chatting last week, you know, with Wes and everybody was, you know, I'm fairly new to Omarchy and so I'm learning the plugin aspect. So I got a lot of projects that, you know, I'm trying to like figure out how to do. @MuchmoreIT: But one of the things I kind of indicated last week and I made a little bit of progress, but because I'm a former AMDer and I got the new ROCm10.0 actually working on my Omarchy Linux AMD system here. So I had to cheat to get it to working first just by spoofing the ID. @MuchmoreIT: But now I'm going to work on actually creating an Arch Linux derivative underneath so that it, at least from an Omarchy perspective, to try and make sure that it runs cleanly. Because the new ROCm10.0, massive performance improvements in the AMD world. @MuchmoreIT: And then, Fred, I was tweeting out to you is that, you know, I recently just picked up a, it's the Dell equivalent of an NVIDIA Spark. And so it's called the GP10. @MuchmoreIT: And so I'm just playing around with it with the default DGX OS right now. But I found somebody that's already done some of the work to get Omarchy running, you know, on a Grace Blackwell chip because that's an ARM CPU matched with NVIDIA GPUs. @MuchmoreIT: And so now I'm just going to do a little bit of a benchmark to see where Ubuntu, DGX is a Ubuntu derivative. So I'm going to do some benchmarks on that. @MuchmoreIT: And then last but not least, my long-term goal is that because I'm so tied into the federal market space, I'm going to try and create some shortcuts for any federal customers that would want Omarchy in the future. So that means I got to go out and create a crypto validation suite that can go run through the past, you know, go get tested at NIST. @MuchmoreIT: And that's going to take probably the better part of a year to do that. But in the meantime, the way that we would do it in the federal space is that we would get the updated list. @MuchmoreIT: And Jesus, Fred, I'm drawing a blank on what my own stuff is for the checklist to be able to go out and just, you make these settings and then it's considered safe for running, somewhat safe for running inside of a federal environment. @ncfrontiersman: Omarchy Fort Knox. We'll call it that. @MuchmoreIT: No, there we go. Yeah, we can use the Fort Knox. And so I have a lot of projects in front of me. @MuchmoreIT: The problem is that it is the end of the federal season and I am like crazy nuts busy. So I don't know how much work I'm going to get done over the next three weeks maybe, but maybe see if I can take a week off once I get there. @nixfred: What's the biggest box you've put together that you've gotten to play with, like the most powerful? We all like big and strong, but most of us don't have access to that stuff. @MuchmoreIT: I've been on about a 5,000 GPU system. And then I've also been on a, from a supercomputer perspective, I've been on a probably about a 250,000 core CPU system, something like that. @ncfrontiersman: There you go. @MuchmoreIT: Yeah, I mean, that's my job. I design high-performance computers and AI systems for the federal government. So I get to talk to all the Department of Energy people all the time and, you know, kind of do some big projects. @MuchmoreIT: So, yep. @ncfrontiersman: Kind of like Tony Stark a little bit? @MuchmoreIT: No, not me. Not me, man. @nixfred: He's very humble, but he's super smart and so much fun to be around. Thank you for joining, Heath. @MuchmoreIT: What's that? @nixfred: I said, you're so much fun to be around and a great friend. Thanks for joining today. And Wes, I'll hand it back over to you for our closer. @ncfrontiersman: Yeah. Yeah, thanks, Heath. Yeah, Hancour, nice to meet you virtually. @ncfrontiersman: We're just, this is our second week of doing this. We're just chatting about the whole plugin ecosystem and, you know, some people have backgrounds in programming engineering, others don't. @ncfrontiersman: And so it's just been a really cool environment to be able to get our ideas out there, to have something, you know, that we use locally first and then decide, hey, we want to share this with other people. And so we've been kind of talking through what that process looks like. @ncfrontiersman: So yeah, first of all, thanks for building the marketplace and all. That's awesome. @ncfrontiersman: But yeah, anything you want to share, any new updates coming? Are you swamped in issues and PRs or any way we can help? @hancore_linux: Well, first of all, thank you for the invite. I just joined because of Nix told me, asked me to join. @nixfred: Thank you for joining. Hey, Hancour, I don't know if you know, but there's this place that you can register and submit a plugin. @hancore_linux: Yeah. @nixfred: Hancour runs it, everybody. @hancore_linux: Yeah, I did plenty of updates today. They were necessary, to be honest. And I didn't have a lot of time to take care of the marketplace. @hancore_linux: So maybe some people recognize that I didn't really do a lot of improvements the last week. So yeah, I just hopped today in and, yeah, started to do some maintenance and yeah, that's it, basically. @ncfrontiersman: Wonderful. Yeah, because we were kind of talking about the process of like, you build a plugin, you submit it, you create the issue, and then you get back security, you know, audit validations and how to work through that process. And we were kind of talking like if we could know ahead of time what things would be checked, you know, you could have your agents kind of keep that in mind before you even build it. @ncfrontiersman: And so we had a guy share about something called OmaKit that he built that kind of helps with that. Somebody has built a skill, but is there anything in the official marketplace or anything in the plans to kind of like beyond the, you know, publishing the plugin guidelines that we could use? @nixfred: Yeah, and what's your process? How do you approve them? @hancore_linux: Sorry again. I didn't hear you. @nixfred: Go ahead, Wes. @ncfrontiersman: No, yeah, no, I think Fred was just saying, what's your process for approving? What's that look like? @hancore_linux: Yeah, well, those were two or three questions. Well, we have some plans like for the new marketplaces, which eventually Ryan or DHH will announce them. So I will not talk much about it, but there will be new submission system as well. @hancore_linux: And yeah, it will become soon, but at the moment we are building it or Ryan is mainly building the backend. I just supported him in the frontend for the webpage. @hancore_linux: And now it's taking some directions, I would say. @ncfrontiersman: Wonderful. @hancore_linux: I don't want to spoil a lot of it, but that's the current state. And how to submit, well, there was some like the OmaKit. This is one tool that you can use. @hancore_linux: And one guy also shared one GitHub. I can't remember the name exactly, but this skill also helped a lot of people to get validated and verified for the plugin. @hancore_linux: So yeah, I would recommend to use this. I cannot predict how the new market system will be checked. @hancore_linux: There will be, of course, checked by the agents, but how deep, how far, what's the requirement for this, I don't know yet. @ncfrontiersman: Well, hey, I'm just excited that there's, you know, there's some movement happening and that people are working on it. So that's great. @ncfrontiersman: Wonderful. Well, thanks for joining and I don't, let's see, anything else you want to say before Fred and I close out? @hancore_linux: No, just thank you again for the invite. @ncfrontiersman: Yeah, thank you for joining. Appreciate it, man. All right, let's see here. @ncfrontiersman: All right, so good chat today. Looks like we got one more person in line and then we're going to call it a day and we'll get started with our week. @ncfrontiersman: Okay, let's see here. It just approved. @ncfrontiersman: Mihai, is that how you say it? Mihai: Yes, can you hear me? @ncfrontiersman: Yes, I can. What's up? What's your question or do you want to share something you're working on? Mihai: Yeah, I wanted to share what I've been working on regarding Omarchy. So I managed to reverse and get an Unreal Tournament engine working on Omarchy. Mihai: So I got a game fully running that's running on Linux as well, but basically on Omarchy, on the Mac. And I got it also on the MacBook, which was quite a bit different. Mihai: So there were quite a lot of differences between them. It's quite interesting. Mihai: It's fully running. And I find it quite interesting that it runs pretty well in Omarchy with the current kernel. @ncfrontiersman: Wonderful. And what's your favorite game to play in it? @ncfrontiersman: Did we lose you? @nixfred: I think we might have lost him. @ncfrontiersman: Maybe lost him. Okay. @nixfred: You want to try Tech Luddite and then close it out or what do you think, Wes? @ncfrontiersman: Yeah, two minutes Tech Luddite and then we'll have to close it out. @ncfrontiersman: And then we'll have to see how bad if my buck's lost or not. I don't know. @ncfrontiersman: It was close when I joined. @nixfred: Well, it doesn't look like he's raising his hand. @ncfrontiersman: Okay. All right, well, let's just call it then. I appreciate everybody joining. @ncfrontiersman: It's been another fun time, Sunday social with my buddy Fred here. And yeah, we'll keep doing this. @ncfrontiersman: We'll keep having conversations. We might have more special guests. @ncfrontiersman: We had special guests today. Maybe we'll have more later. @ncfrontiersman: Everybody's a special guest, to be honest with you. @nixfred: I love that. That's exactly right. @ncfrontiersman: You know, because we're all, you know, we're all in our own places and our own life building and just moving forward and having fun. And let's let this be a positive place to share and help each other. @nixfred: And follow each other. @ncfrontiersman: Yep, let's do that. So let's call it. You all have a good week and we'll see you next Sunday. @nixfred: See you next Sunday. Thanks, Wes. Thanks, everybody. @ncfrontiersman: Yeah, thank you, Fred. @nixfred: All right, I'm clear. # EP 03: Omarchy Sunday Social: The One Where Lee Told Us What It Is For Part of "Omarchy! Omarchy! Omarchy!", the weekly Omarchy X Space. Every Sunday, 3pm EST, live on X. - Recorded: Sunday, September 27, 2026, 3pm EST - Length: 75 minutes - Speakers: 14+ - Hosts: @ncfrontiersman, @NixFred - Listen: https://x.com/i/spaces/1yKAPwykzqrxb - Post on X: https://x.com/NixFred - Web: https://omarchyspaces.com/ep/03/ ## Summary (as posted on X by @NixFred) Omarchy Sunday Social, Episode 3: the one where Lee told us what it is actually for Recorded Sunday, September 27, 2026. X dropped the first room out from under us before we even started, so if you were in the one that died, that is why. The second one held. Every week so far we have talked about what we are building. This week somebody told us what it is for, and it reframed the whole thing. So this write-up leads with him. WHO WAS IN THE ROOM @NotJustShaking, Lee Shand, 54, from England, living near Nashville, diagnosed with early onset Parkinson's. @ncfrontiersman Wes Grimes, co-host, built OmaStorm. Me, co-host. @thetundeo Tundy in London, back with the report from the first Omarchy London meetup. Mutahir in the Netherlands by way of Pakistan, storage guy turned SRE, built the Oma Vault config sync plugin. @BlackOpsREPL Victorio in Milan, starting an Italian meetup from nothing. @OnTheLiftAI Chris, bringing AI to automotive dealerships. Jeff, retired engineer in eastern Arizona, started a meetup at a Starbucks. @tim_sonner Tim, 20 years of Linux, first time here. Porsche, software developer, running Hermes agents with a Kanban board. @gh_TechLuddite Tech Luddite with the Hermes warnings. @cfaulkingham Colin on why the built-in skill is the killer feature. Snowy, live from Scotland. Gav, who runs his home lab from a boat. Kozha in Cologne, mid-reinstall while talking to us. @tylermayberry Tyler, shipping Ibara. PART ONE: LEE Lee Shand spent his career in IT. UK government as a kid, then trading floor support in the London stock market, then an asset management firm. Somebody needed business continuity handled back when nobody knew what that was, they asked him, and his career took off from there. He ended up VP for business continuity, crisis management and incident management at a firm with $600 billion under management. England to New Jersey to Nashville. About four years in, he was diagnosed with Parkinson's. Early onset, which means before 50. He was about a month into his fifties. He had known something was wrong well before that. His Parkinson's is cognitive, not the tremor most people picture. Memory. Empathy. In his words, the worst part is not the symptom list: "I was, before Parkinson's, the life and soul of the party. They used to call me the mayor of the office. Everybody knew me. I knew everyone. And that kind of faded away. It's probably one of the worst bits of the disease, actually, to watch yourself not be the person that you used to be for people at work, for your family, for your wife." He got let go. He tried day trading for a while and wrote a book about it. Then a friend told him to start writing things down, because he was starting to crack up. His memory was going, and he kept forgetting the symptoms he meant to raise with his neurologist. So he found Obsidian and started building. Here is the part that stopped the room. Lee had never used Linux. Fifty four years, never. Windows did the job, and before the disease he was a heavy gamer. But the deeper he got into AI, the more obvious it became that there was a better life out there in terms of an operating system. He cannot remember where he first saw Omarchy, he thinks a YouTube video. It took him about ten minutes to decide he had to try it. He put it on an external SSD, played with it for a few days, and by day four he was sold. The first thing he built was not impressive and that is exactly why it matters. It is a plugin called First Boot, and it puts one thing on his bar: the time he turned the machine on that day. That is the time he takes his meds. He takes the next round four hours later. Before the plugin, his memory would lose that, and losing it made it a bad day. "The fewer things that I can do to take the stress off me happen to use my energy, the leftover dopamine that I have in the brain, the better for me. It all comes down to ease of use, and how easy it is on my cognitive system." Then the bigger system. Every AI he used kept failing him the same way: context. Codex, Claude Code, it did not matter. It would always run out. And as he points out, a million token window does not fix it, because it resets eventually and the deeper you go the more it costs. So his AI writes everything into Obsidian. Every thought, every conversation, every meeting, every article. It updates the vault at the end of each day and again at the end of the week. When he switches models, the new one reads the handover file and picks up where the last one left off. He can sit down and ask "where am I, where were we yesterday, we talked about this six months ago, what are my next steps," and get an answer. "It truly is my second brain. People band around that phrase a lot, but for me, it really is." And then the line that changed the temperature in the room. He has not seen a neurologist in four years because he cannot afford health insurance. "If AI ever gets taken away from me, if my Omarchy ever gets taken away from me, I will not have a life anymore, because those two things together is what holds me together and gives me a purpose right now." He is not done building either. The problem he is chewing on now is that a vault remembers what you thought six months ago and has no idea it has changed. His example, and he used me as the guinea pig: today he might think Fred is a really nice guy. In six months he might think Fred is an absolute dickhead. Obsidian does not know that unless he tells it. So his plugin Where Was I is going to have the AI audit his own context weekly or monthly, work out what might have changed, ask him questions, and set the record straight. Crucially, without erasing the old entry, because that is history. He wants to know why he changed his mind, not pretend he never held the old view. His closing argument, and he asked to make it: "This would be every cognitive issue. The workflow here is night and day different from Windows. And this will change people's lives. The fact that you can have an issue on Omarchy and the AI client will open up and solve it for you. I had an issue today. It did exactly that. For me, this is the future, not just for people who don't have my kind of condition, but definitely for people who are cognitively challenged." He offered himself up: if anyone ever needs a proponent for Omarchy from a cognitive perspective, he is your man. GO FOLLOW LEE. SERIOUSLY. He is on 164 followers as I write this. He is on a fixed income. His dream is to build enough of an audience on X that it becomes income. X: https://x.com/NotJustShaking Substack: https://shaggyrs6.substack.com His Omarchy video, made this week, about what this OS means to a Parkinson's sufferer: https://x.com/NotJustShaking/status/2104231941415535051 His book, Not Just Shaking, is on Amazon. Follow him. If you can spare it, subscribe. It costs you almost nothing and it matters a lot to him. One more thing worth knowing: hancore, who runs the plugin marketplace and joined us last week, is working on eye-controlled mouse input. Lee's Parkinson's is cognitive and he does not have the mobility problem, but plenty of people with it do. That work is going to matter to somebody. PART TWO: EVERYBODY ELSE Prior art, and not burning tokens on it Lots of PRs for other people this week on my end. Larry has a standing rule to check prior art before building anything, so I hand over the idea and he goes and looks. Twice this week that ended with me not building anything and just using an existing plugin instead. That is a win, not a loss. We are still in the early days and the stuff being created is mind-blowing. If you have an idea, go see if somebody already did it. If they did, improve it, fix a bug, add a feature, send a PR. Or build it for yourself and keep it to yourself, because it is functional for you. That is allowed. Tundy: the London meetup actually happened Sixty registered, about thirty five turned up, three organizers, four speakers. One guy walked in wearing an Omarchy hoodie and Tundy was in stitches. Mehmet from the Omarchy security team explained what actually constitutes a vulnerability, how the team is structured, and how fixes get moved upstream. The message was responsible disclosure: do not go on X and cast aspersions for attention. They get a lot of issues, they find the vulnerabilities, they fix them. And the detail worth repeating everywhere: now that they have a kernel engineer on the team, there are fixes they can land in the Omarchy kernel within two days, before it reaches mainstream. Gavin Nugent, who runs the No Signal YouTube channel, is building an Adobe Creative Suite for Omarchy. Lightroom, Premiere, all of it, end to end. He has thirty years in post production and ran his own post house. He knows what works and what is broken, and he is starting to release. Tundy's whole company runs Omarchy except the designers and marketers, who are still on Mac. This is the thing that changes that. Tristan, who makes Cloud DIR and Rencal, a calendar application native to Omarchy. His philosophy is that applications should be built on text based data stores, because agents find those easy to work with. He also brought a Game Boy running Omarchy, which was the hit of the night. As I said on the call, it kind of makes sense: arrow keys and three buttons, on an OS that already got away from the mouse. On the atmosphere, Wes asked the right question. Tundy's answer: nerds are nerds, everybody is shy to start, you find one or two people and talk to them all night. He had to push himself out of his comfort zone to circulate. But people talked, and a guy with a game he had built was showing it around. Next London one is in two months. He is going to Copenhagen tomorrow to see how they run theirs, and he wants to talk David into coming to the next London event. Victorio: starting Omarchy Milan from nothing Programmer in Milan, twenty years on Linux, always a tiling window manager user, so Omarchy was an easy landing. He noticed there is no Italian meetup, decided that day he wants to host one, and used the mic to say so out loud and look for a sponsor and for Italians listening. If that is you, DM him. Wes told him what he told Tundy: just step out on faith, you will be met. Tundy went from "I think I might want to do this" to four talks and thirty five people in about two weeks. Victorio is also building a planning problem solver, scheduling and vehicle routing, a kind of AI that is not generative, and he wants it on Omarchy. Two PRs in already. Mutahir: Omarchy has its own personality Born in Pakistan, studied and worked in London, now in the Netherlands, two kids. Started in IT in 1999 with networks, then Solaris, then a lot of Microsoft, then storage, NetApp and Hitachi, then solution architect, now SRE for a US company. Lifelong distro hopper, so he has seen the pattern: a new distro arrives and its pitch is that you can theme it to look like a Mac, or like Windows. He remembers when they shipped Lindows. What he liked about DHH's first video was that none of that was said. Omarchy has its own personality. It is not trying to be something else. He has built two plugins, one of them a config sync called Oma Vault, and he submitted a wallpaper for the heritage theme honoring Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and the creator of vi, because nobody else had picked him. Jeff: a cheap PC, a bad riser cable, and Lego bricks Retired engineer, twenty five years in Silicon Valley, now in eastern Arizona where there are more pine trees than technology. He ran his first meetup at the local Starbucks in Show Low last Thursday. Linux since the mid-nineties, back to the Yggdrasil distro on twenty floppy disks. He bought a cheap used PC off Facebook Marketplace, put Omarchy on it, and saw a pile of junk in the system log. The AI pointed at a riser cable. He bought a new one, it fixed it, and it explains why the machine was cheap: it had been crashing for the previous owner. He would not have known to look for what the AI was looking for. Then the good one. There is an open source CAD program called BREP with an MCP server built in. He wrote a skill file about Lego dimensions: stud height, wall thickness, all of it. Then he pointed a local Qwen model on his Mac Studio at the CAD through Omarchy and had it generate eight Lego bricks. It did it perfectly. He exported an STL, printed them, and sat in his chair scratching his chin. He is mostly a local model guy, on a five dollar a month Gemini plan and a 128GB M4 Mac Studio, because he is retired and keeping costs down. He also built a plugin called Radio Garden, a drop down web view of radio.garden, like Radio Atlas but in color with more stations. Tim: repurposing potatoes Twenty plus years of Linux as a basic user, a lot of blue collar work, only recently into tech properly. Never used a tiling window manager, never used Hyprland, always GNOME. What got him was the install: ISO, boot, install, in the OS in two minutes. The only friction was the key bindings, and once he had about twelve of them down it was fine. His phrase for the movement is the one I want to keep: repurposing potatoes. He also described the plugin ecosystem as an ocean where there is a niche for everybody, which is about right. Wes and I both agreed on the key binding thing. You think you cannot do it after years of point and click, you give it a day, and then you cannot explain how you already know them. And for me the bigger change is that windows became disposable. Open it, do the one thing, close it. Porsche: Hermes, Kanban, and bots that hire bots Started on Linux almost twenty years ago while living in China, because she could not find a legal copy of Windows and was tired of buying fake ones. Ubuntu, then Mint. Became a software developer, worked in a lot of Mac shops, and Omarchy finally gave her an excuse to put Linux back on her own machine. First time using tiling. She runs a Hermes agent attached to Telegram and hosted on a private server, so she can talk to it from Omarchy, from a Mac, or from her phone, and the conversation persists across all of them. She is deep in the Kanban feature, where it takes tasks and carries them out on its own, spawning sub agents. She gave it one ticket to build a presentation about domestic cats in the United States and it split itself into four tickets and project managed the whole thing. She also builds what she calls huddles, several bots in one room. She made an HR bot, gave it permissive settings and a soul, and it created other bots for a project without being asked. Her practical tip: cap the number of attempts in a huddle, because unlimited means they will burn all your tokens arguing. Each bot can run its own model. When Wes suggested the value is that it forces small iterative tasks and better context engineering, she corrected him, twice, and she was right: "I don't force it at all." Tech Luddite: be careful where you put Hermes He has three Hermes installations in different configurations and was careful to call himself an amateur at it. His warning is the useful part: Hermes does things on its own, by design. It does more than you explicitly tell it to. A harness with good system instructions can be held firmer; those are still soft guardrails, but they are tighter. He put his third installation in a dedicated working folder because he is not comfortable with the default location. His advice, which I would take: be careful where you put it, or spend real time learning what it does on its own before you let it run. He is currently using six harnesses because he is deliberately learning them individually. He said it is not efficient. It is how he likes to work. Snowy, from Scotland: a comms manager, a researcher, a reviewer, and a coach Same Hermes thread from another angle. She runs a comms manager for social posts, a researcher, a reviewer, and a coach that tells her when she has not moved enough or has eaten too much. Kanban splits a task across the bots, each one on a model suited to its job, a research-strong model for the researcher. And the small thing that makes it work: she told her Omarchy laptop to make Super Shift H the Hermes shortcut, so it opens on a keystroke into the scratchpad, and she can flick back to it any time to see how it is getting on. That combination is why she likes the two together. Colin: the built-in skill is the killer feature Using agents on Omarchy is refreshing compared to a Mac because the built-in Omarchy skill means the agent actually understands what it can do. He had Kua Hyper messing with Hyprland and breaking things across machines, handed it to an agent, and it fixed it. He wants to see the skill go even further and become the core of the platform. Wes added the other half: nearly everything on the system is configured in plain TOML or config files that reload when edited. No registry, no plist. That is what makes it perfect for agents. Colin has already modified the bundled agents plugin himself to add Grok and DeepSeek, which is the whole point. Do not like how a plugin behaves? Change it. Jeff, who admitted he did not know what a skill file was until recently, pointed out where they live for anyone else in that boat: a hidden .agents folder in your home directory, with skills inside, human readable Markdown you can read and extend. Gav: a home lab on a boat IT infrastructure and operations director for a global pharmaceutical tech company in the UK. He lives on a boat on the south coast. He built his entire home lab, or boat lab, on two mini PC servers running NixOS plus a Raspberry Pi for a NAS, and used Omarchy on his laptop to set all of it up. He self hosts around twenty four apps. Then the part I want to steal: he runs a daily ops standup with his agents that walks the whole stack and reports his 3-2-1 backup status, errors in the logs, networking, and what is running. He is honest about the arc, too. Serial distro hopper, CachyOS, NixOS, started on Bazzite and bounced off the lockdown. And he hated the original version of Omarchy, no lie, because he is a minimalist. He moved to Quattro at launch and is now stuck on it and no longer hopping. He also wants wind data in OmaStorm, which Wes says is coming, somebody has a PR in. Kozha: reinstalling live on the call In Cologne, talking to us while doing a full reinstall. His machine went into a reboot loop and showed a tiny message about no key found for the password, as though the disk were encrypted, which he never did. He suspects a bad Wi-Fi connection corrupted an update mid-flight, since he installed over flaky Wi-Fi with no LAN adapter. Tech Luddite's advice for anyone who lands there: first check from outside the boot process whether the disk is actually encrypted, and if it is not, go read the last few session logs and have an agent analyze them. It felt like you did nothing, and you probably did do nothing, but something did. Kozha's own summary is the one I keep thinking about. Every computer in his household is now exclusively Omarchy. His girlfriend asked for dual boot on her laptop and inside 24 hours it was Omarchy only, because she liked it too. His line on Windows: buying a Windows computer is like buying a baby. It needs antivirus, it needs this, it needs that, and no, you cannot go home yet because it needs to update. He never expected old machines to run at this pace again. Tyler: Ibara Building Ibara, which connects all of your PCs and hands them to your agents. Control them from your main Omarchy machine and reach every other Omarchy machine through one flow. If it is on Tailscale, you install a plugin, press a button, and hand it to any agent, or drive the desktop yourself. Like Grokbot, except it is all your own hardware. He was trying to ship it the next day. Chris: slow down Brings AI to automotive dealerships, diagnostic tools and the rest. What he wanted to say was thank you, to Wes and me and Tech Luddite, for helping him get into the mindset of slowing down and building methodically. Wes had the better version of it: there is always the feeling that you could kick off another agent, spend more tokens, build more. But the best things come from stepping away and asking what is actually bothering you, then going back and fixing that. There is a difference between being busy and making progress. And AI will tell you everything you do is amazing, because it is an amplifier, so keep your own agency. Chris's version: if I eat rocks, will it get rid of my headache? Yes. There is still some thinking you have to do yourself. THE QUESTIONS STILL OPEN Q1. Who else is Omarchy quietly load bearing for? Lee is one person who found this on his own and rebuilt his life around it. He is not going to be the only one. Nobody is looking for these people, and there is no obvious place for them to land when they arrive. Q2. What happens to accessibility work in this community? hancore is building eye-controlled mouse input. Lee is building cognitive scaffolding. Neither of them started out as an accessibility project and neither of them is coordinated with the other. Is that a thing the community should organize, or does it work better as people scratching their own itch in public? Q3. How do you keep a second brain honest over time? Lee's problem generalizes to everyone with a memory system: it stores what you believed, and has no idea when you stop believing it. His answer is a scheduled audit that asks you questions and appends the correction without destroying the history. Nobody else in the room had solved it. Most of us have not noticed it yet. Q4. Where should Hermes actually live? Three people ran into the same thing from different directions. It does more than you tell it to, by design. Tech Luddite moved his to a dedicated folder because he was not comfortable with the default. Porsche runs hers on a private server. Nobody stated a norm. What is the safe default install for something that acts on its own? Q5. Does the built-in skill become the platform? Colin wants it to go further and become the core of Omarchy. Everybody agreed it is the killer feature. Nobody knows what "further" looks like or who decides. Q6. Corrupt update, no recovery story. Kozha's machine broke mid-update over bad Wi-Fi and the only path back was a full reinstall. Tech Luddite raised checksums after download and said he has not verified whether that happens. That is worth someone actually checking. Q7. What is the Italian meetup going to need? Victorio said out loud that the hard part is a sponsor and a venue. Tundy's answer two weeks ago was just do it and ask a friend for a room. The pattern is repeatable but nobody has written it down. ASKS ON THE TABLE Follow Lee Shand. Subscribe to his Substack if you can. That is the ask of the week. Victorio needs Italians and a venue for Omarchy Milan. Gav wants wind data in OmaStorm, and there is a PR waiting for Wes to get to. Tundy is in Copenhagen this week and wants David at the next London meetup. Tyler is shipping Ibara and wants people to try it. Everybody: follow everybody in the room. Bring a friend next week. NEXT SUNDAY Same time, 3pm EST. Same deal: raise your hand, tell us what you are building, tell us where you are stuck. You do not need anything impressive. Jeff introduced himself and ended up teaching the room how to print Lego bricks from a CAD MCP server. Omarchy is an operating system, so what. The community is what makes this thing important. Get out there this week and reach out to somebody. Help somebody. Be the person who lifts them up, it does not cost you anything. Help an old lady across the street, and when you get her over there, put Omarchy on her laptop. Wes and I just happen to be the hosts. You are the star. A note on the transcript: the transcription tool assigns speaker labels automatically and it got several of them wrong, including putting Lee's name on Wes's hosting lines through the back half. Those have been corrected by hand against the audio's context. Speakers whose X handle we could not confirm appear under their first name. ## Transcript Machine generated. Speaker labels come from the transcription tool and are reused for different people; the summary says who is who. @ncfrontiersman: Yep. Okay. Wonderful. @ncfrontiersman: X is a space is a little bit buggy, but I think we're good now. I see people jumping in. @ncfrontiersman: Fred, are you there? @NixFred: You bet I am, brother. How do I sound? @ncfrontiersman: You sound crisp. @NixFred: Crisp. @ncfrontiersman: So... @NixFred: Yeah. $99 will do for you, Fred. @ncfrontiersman: Love it. Love it. All right. @ncfrontiersman: Well, I mean, we can give people a couple minutes to hop in. It's just getting started, but beautiful Sunday afternoon here on the East Coast. @NixFred: Well, let me... I'm going to go find Leon and make sure he's in because... @ncfrontiersman: He's in. @NixFred: Oh, Leon? @ncfrontiersman: I see him. Yeah, he's in. @NixFred: Oh, there he is. What's up, Lee? @NixFred: You can speak, man. @NotJustShaking: Yeah. I'm here. I'm here. @NixFred: Hey, Lee. Good to see you, man. @NotJustShaking: Yeah, you too. @ncfrontiersman: Lee, what's happening? Nice to meet you, man. @NotJustShaking: Yeah, you as well. Thank you for the invite. @ncfrontiersman: Absolutely. @NixFred: You got to just wait till you hear what he's doing with Omarchy. It's amazing. @ncfrontiersman: Oh, I've been waiting all week, man. I really have. @NixFred: Yeah, we... when was it, Lee, two days ago we spoke by Zoom? @NotJustShaking: Yes, sir. @NixFred: Sir, you don't have to call me sir. That's my mom. @NixFred: Yeah, but man, you have a great story. And when I heard it, I was like... I asked Wes, I was like, "What do you think?" @NixFred: And he goes, "Absolutely." You got to get Lee on. @ncfrontiersman: Yeah. @NotJustShaking: Yeah. @ncfrontiersman: Yeah. This is the kind of stuff that... everybody talks, and I'll say this probably a few times, but everybody keeps talking about AI as, "Oh, it's never being used for anything good in this world." I'm like, "Bullcrap." @ncfrontiersman: And this is the perfect example of that. I think it's unlocking something for people that maybe would have had to have spent too much money or just not had the ability to at all. @ncfrontiersman: And now it's just kind of levels of playing field, and I love it, so. @NotJustShaking: Yep. Absolutely. @NixFred: And then you got folks like Hancour that are doing the mouse-driven by the eyes, which is incredible, which... Lee, does not have the mobility problem. And Lee, I'm not going to tell your story, but... @ncfrontiersman: Wow. @NixFred: But a lot of folks with Parkinson's do have that trouble, and Hancour is working on being able to control your mouse with the eyes. I think I tagged you on that, Lee. It's pretty incredible stuff he's working on. @ncfrontiersman: Wow. @NotJustShaking: Yeah, good. I did see that. @NixFred: Hey, Lee. Can you speak up a little bit when we talk? @NotJustShaking: Yeah, let me move. @ncfrontiersman: All right. So if everybody in here could take a minute and share the X space just so everybody gets the latest one because the other one dropped out, that would help. @ncfrontiersman: I want to try to get a few more folks in before we get started here. @NixFred: Done. I did it. I did it. @ncfrontiersman: All right. Awesome. @ncfrontiersman: It's kind of like... I don't know if any of y'all work where you have to get in a Zoom or something, and it's like, "Let's give people a few minutes to hop in." @NixFred: Yeah. @NotJustShaking: Yeah. @ncfrontiersman: I know. I know. I feel like for those of us that are punctual... @NixFred: Exactly. Punish the people on time. @ncfrontiersman: It's like church. It's like, "Get that music going. Get them sitting in their seats." @NixFred: So, Wes, let's look at the folks that are here and make a mental note before it gets too big. These are the people that show up, and it's important. And I know that we've got you planned out today to have folks speak and tell their story. @NixFred: Lee's going to lead it off for us and show us how it's done. But then let's make sure that the folks that showed up early want to speak first online. @ncfrontiersman: Yeah, totally. So if anybody wants to speak, go ahead and give me a thumbs up. Again, it's just a simple, "Hey, what's going on? @ncfrontiersman: What are you working on?" If you got a question for the group, that kind of thing, just thumbs up. @NixFred: Here's Christopher White on the Lift AI. He thumbs up. I don't know if he's in or not, but. @ncfrontiersman: Okay. @NixFred: Okay. There'll be more people than we can have time for, but. @ncfrontiersman: All right. @NixFred: All right. Up to you, Wes. @ncfrontiersman: All right. Great. Tundy's got an update. @ncfrontiersman: So I saw Tundy. @NixFred: He's awesome. Tundy's awesome. And he had an amazing... this time I'm right. @NixFred: He had an amazing kickoff to the London. So we got to hear all about that this week, the London meetup. @NixFred: Last week I was a little. @ncfrontiersman: Sure. @NixFred: Sure. @ncfrontiersman: Yeah, definitely. Can't wait. Okay. @ncfrontiersman: All right. Well, you know what? @ncfrontiersman: Let's go ahead and get started. People can hop in when they want to. @ncfrontiersman: And yeah, so this is what? Is this the second or third one? @ncfrontiersman: This is the third one. @NixFred: This is the third. @ncfrontiersman: This is episode three, whatever you want to call it. And yeah, I mean, I'm just kind of blown away at how this has gone and everybody has been sharing what they're doing, their story. I love it. @ncfrontiersman: I want this to be a community, no matter what background you come from, engineering or not, any political spectrum, any spectrum of all kinds, that we can all just come be together and have a moment on Sundays before the week gets crazy to just chat and lift each other up. So I'm looking forward to it. @ncfrontiersman: I know everybody's got something they want to share, but yeah, Fred, what's been going on in your neck of the woods? @NixFred: Lots of PRs. Put in some PRs for some other folks. This week I had a couple of ideas and I was working on them. @NixFred: And one ended up happening is Larry, he's got a standing rule to go check prior art. And what I typically do is give Larry the idea and then he checks prior art. @NixFred: And there's a thing that we all get so crazy about AI and making applications and tokens are so expensive. So I came up with some ideas that I wanted to do this week, and then I ended up just using existing plugins. @NixFred: And we're still in the real early days with Omarchy, but things are being created and designed that are just mind-blowing. And I'd encourage you to continue to make your own stuff and customize. @NixFred: And if you've got an idea of something that you want to build, go look and see if there's somebody that's already done it. And if they have, either improve it, fix a bug, add a feature, send a PR, or if you don't want to do that, build it for yourself and just keep it to yourself because it's functional for you. @NixFred: And so when you think about making things that function for you, I bumped into this guy, Lee Shand, on X. And he sent me a DM and he said, "Hey, man, I want to talk to you." @NixFred: And I think it was actually public that he said, "Hey, can we meet online?" And I said, "Absolutely." @NixFred: And that goes for each and every one of you. If there's something that you want to talk about and you've got something that you want to work through together, it can be about computers, it can be about Omarchy, it can be about life. @NixFred: And the cool thing is, Lee hit all three of those boxes. He wanted to talk about life, he wanted to talk about computers, he wanted to talk about Omarchy. @NixFred: And we spent probably an hour, hour plus, a couple of days ago. And I was just dumbfounded at the things that Lee's done and the way that he's using Omarchy. @NixFred: And Lee, I really appreciate your friendship that we're already building. And it's pretty amazing. @NixFred: And then can you just take a couple of minutes and I don't want to share too much of your story because there's some things that are pretty personal. And you told me that I had the green light, but I'm going to... I want you to tell people the things that you told me and introduce yourself. @NixFred: And then myself and Wes will just ask you a few questions. And let's go for it, Lee. @NixFred: Who are you? What do you do? @NixFred: And you've got Parkinson's, man. That fucking sucks. @NixFred: Tell us what you're doing about it. @NotJustShaking: Yeah. So thanks, Fred. And thanks for that chat that we had earlier on in the week. @NotJustShaking: It was amazing. I'd recommend anyone that wants to get with Fred to do so. @NotJustShaking: It won't be time wasted. But as Fred said, my name is Lee. @NotJustShaking: I'm 54. Originally from England, and I moved to the US about 12 years ago for work. @NotJustShaking: Just a quick rundown of my background. It's an IT-based background. @NotJustShaking: I worked for the government as a kid, and then I finished up there and was trade floor support for a company within the UK stock market and then an asset management firm in the UK. And then around the wide UK, they needed someone to look after business continuity. @NotJustShaking: And of course, nobody knew what that was back then. And they asked me to do that. @NotJustShaking: And my career just kind of took off from there, and I became the VP for business continuity, crisis management, and incident management for a $600 billion asset under management firm based in the US. Started with them in the UK, and then, like I say, I moved to the US. @NotJustShaking: Started there in New Jersey, and then they transferred the firm down to the Nashville area, and that's where I am now. @NixFred: And it's awesome. Oh, sorry. Go ahead. @NixFred: Go ahead. @NotJustShaking: Sorry. And about four years into that, I was... in that move down to Nashville, I was diagnosed with Parkinson's. And early onset Parkinson's, actually, which means any age before 50 or 50 bang on. @NotJustShaking: I think I was probably a month into my 50s. And I knew something was going wrong well before then. @NotJustShaking: We were going through COVID, and everybody was working from home. And I was, before Parkinson's, the life and soul of the party. @NotJustShaking: They used to call me the mayor of the office. Everybody knew me. @NotJustShaking: I knew everyone. And that kind of faded away. @NotJustShaking: It's probably one of the worst bits of the disease, actually, to watch yourself not be the person that you used to be for people at work, for your family, for your wife. And ultimately, I got let go. @NotJustShaking: I got let go, and then I kind of tried to day trade in for a little while. I wrote a book on day trading. @NotJustShaking: And then to cut a very long story short, I needed to start writing stuff down because I was starting to crack up. A friend of mine told me to write stuff down. @NotJustShaking: And then my memory started to go, and I was forgetting about the symptoms that I would want to go and talk to my neurologist about. And then I found a product called Obsidian and started building. @NixFred: Hold on, Lee. Before you go there, let's back up a little bit. So you had never used Linux before, Omarchy. @NixFred: Is that correct? @NotJustShaking: No. 54 years on this planet, I've used Linux till last time. @NixFred: Why is that? Is it because it just didn't... the interface wasn't right, or it didn't help you out, or was Windows and Macintosh doing the job for you? @NotJustShaking: Yeah. No. Windows was doing the job for me. @NotJustShaking: I was... before the disease, I was heavy into playing games. I still do a little bit now, half of it, so I'll tell you if anyone knows what that is. @NotJustShaking: But yeah, no, it was doing the job for me. But the more that I got into AI through the Obsidian stuff that I was doing, the more it became apparent that there was a better life out there in terms of an OS. @NotJustShaking: And I can't even remember where I saw Omarchy. I think it was a YouTube video. @NotJustShaking: And it took me about 10 minutes to figure out that I needed to try it. So I did it in stages. @NotJustShaking: I put it on an SSD, an external SSD, and played around with it for a few days. And I think after day four, I was sold. @NotJustShaking: The way that I could be productive in Omarchy versus the way that I couldn't be productive in the way that I wanted to was night and day. And an example of that would be I can decide... how can I say this? @NotJustShaking: I'm not going to say that Omarchy proves everything to move away from Windows, right? But because it's an agentic system, it enables me to have so much more control over what I want to do. @NotJustShaking: For instance, the actual first thing I did with Omarchy, right, which there's ways I could have done this with Windows, is that I need to know what time I woke up, right? And Windows used to tell me through the Event Viewer, right? @NotJustShaking: I'd just go and look in the Event Viewer, and it'd tell me when I first turned my PC on. That was just a pain in its ass itself. @NotJustShaking: The fewer things that I can do to take the stress off me happen to use my energy, the leftover dopamine that I have in the brain, the better for me. It all comes down to ease of use, right, and how easy it is on my cognitive system. @NotJustShaking: So the first thing I did with Omarchy, and this was after about two days, is I wrote a little plugin that's just called First Boot. And it puts on my bar, right, that I have at the bottom the first day at the time I woke up. @NotJustShaking: And that's important to me because that's exactly the time I take my meds. And I know I have to take my next round of meds four hours after that. @NotJustShaking: And because of my memory, I would always forget that. Then that would become a bad day. @NixFred: Okay. And I'm going to stop me if I share too much, but your Parkinson's is not to the point where you're the shaky part. Your Parkinson's is your memory, correct? @NixFred: And so. @NotJustShaking: Yeah. My Parkinson's right now is all cognitive-based. So memory, empathy. @NixFred: I'm sorry to talk over you. @NotJustShaking: That's all right. You go. @NixFred: The mix of Omarchy and Obsidian together, you showed me your spiderweb of Obsidian. And what is there like? 2,000, 3,000 years ago? @NixFred: It was amazing. @NotJustShaking: Yeah. So where AI was failing me was context. @NotJustShaking: Even in Codex or Claude Code, I was using Claude Code and Codex as a kind of chatbot, right? But it doesn't really matter. @NotJustShaking: It applies everywhere, right, even to the chat portion. But it would always run out of context. @NotJustShaking: And I wanted something to have that would never run out of context. So whenever I went back to my PC, I knew where I left off. @NotJustShaking: Now, even if you set your context to one million tokens within whichever AI client that you're using, right, number one, that's going to reset at some point. And number two, the further you get into that context, right, the more tokens you're using. @NotJustShaking: So what I've built with what I've built with Obsidian is my AI of choice will log every single thing that I do, every thought I have, every conversation I have, every meeting I go to, every article I write is saved within my Obsidian application. @NixFred: That's amazing. @NotJustShaking: So I never lose context because my AI will update it at the end of every day with today's work. It will update it at the end of the week with the week's work. So it always knows where I am. @NotJustShaking: Even when I switch AI LLM, so maybe I'm going from Codex to Claude, Claude will pick that up as well. It'll read the hand over MD, and it will know where I am. @NotJustShaking: So wherever I go, it doesn't matter. I can always type into AI that, "Where am I? @NotJustShaking: Where was we yesterday? We talked about this six months ago. @NotJustShaking: What's my next steps?" I can't remember. @NixFred: I gotcha. Wow. So it's truly augmenting your brain. @NixFred: It's your second yeah. @NotJustShaking: It truly is my second brain. People band around that phrase a lot, but for me, it really is. And I did that little video that I popped up on my X account earlier and said that if I don't have any income, I've not seen a neurologist for four years because I can't afford health insurance. @NotJustShaking: If AI ever gets taken away from me, if my Omarchy ever gets taken away from me, I will not have a life anymore because those two things together is what holds me together and gives me a purpose right now. The only issue I have with it, and actually, this comes from our conversation. @NotJustShaking: You asked me the other day, Fred, "Where do I get my ideas from?" Well, it's by having conversations like this. @NotJustShaking: And I would ask everybody every opportunity they can do to have conversations like this with the people here or outside of here, do it because that sparks ideas. And I realize what I need now to do with my system, the problem I have with that is what I thought and logged six months ago. @NotJustShaking: And I said this to Fred in the meeting. It was only afterwards that I thought of the solution. @NotJustShaking: Is today I might think Fred's a really nice guy, right? Six months' time, I might think Fred's an absolute dickhead, right? @NotJustShaking: But Obsidian won't know that, right? I'd have to tell it. @NotJustShaking: So how I thought of doing that, and this will go into my plugin that I've created for Omarchy as well called Where Was I, is that I'm going to have AI audit my context on a monthly basis or a weekly basis. So it'll go through all my context, think of all the things at a high level that might have changed or would have an implication to me and my thoughts if they had changed, ask me a bunch of questions, and it'll go back and set the record @NotJustShaking: straight. Now, I don't want that record to be changed, right? Because that's history, right? @NotJustShaking: I may well have thought Fred was a nice person six months ago, right? But I want to know why I don't think he's a nice person now. @NotJustShaking: Do you get me? @NixFred: It's very common. Very common. Okay. @NixFred: Lee, we really appreciate you coming in and speaking with us. And I appreciate your friendship. @NixFred: I've really never messed around with Substack, but I did subscribe to your Substack. Could everybody do me and Lee and Wes a favor? @NixFred: Could you follow Lee right now? And if you find it in your heart to subscribe to his Substack, he is on a fixed income, and things don't get any cheaper. @NixFred: So follow your heart. If you want to subscribe to him, great. @NixFred: But please, everybody follow Lee. Let's blow him up. @NixFred: And his dream is to be able to influence folks on X and possibly get some income through that. So let's help him out here. @NotJustShaking: Oh, yeah. @NixFred: And Lee, we really appreciate you, man. @NotJustShaking: Yeah. Let me just close off with one thing. I will say about Omarchy that for someone with cognitive issues, not just Parkinson's, right? @NotJustShaking: This would be every cognitive issue. The workflow here, right, is night and day different from Windows. @NotJustShaking: And I speak about it on my Substack nonstop. People are probably getting annoyed with me, but I'm in a lot of Parkinson's or neurodivergent subscriptions on Substack. @NotJustShaking: And this will change people's lives. The fact that you can have an issue on Omarchy and you can just and the AI client will open up and solve it for you. @NotJustShaking: I had an issue today. It did exactly that. @NotJustShaking: It's mind-blowing. For me, this is the future, not just for people who don't have my kind of condition, but definitely for people who are cognitively challenged, this makes it so much easier. @NixFred: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think about people with Alzheimer's. @NixFred: It runs in my family. Maybe one day I'll have to deal with that. @NixFred: And it's just to think that there's hope. It's just really cool. @NixFred: Thank you for sharing your story, Lee. And I got a feeling I'm going to want you to talk a lot more often. @NotJustShaking: Absolutely. Absolutely. @NixFred: I want to hear what you got to say. You've got a lot to tell. And yeah, everybody, please follow Lee. @NixFred: Support him. @NotJustShaking: Yeah. Do you ever need a proponent for Omarchy from a cognitive perspective? I'm your man. @NotJustShaking: I could talk all day about it. @NixFred: Awesome. All right. That's wonderful. @NixFred: All right. Thank you, Lee. @NotJustShaking: You're very welcome. @NixFred: I tried to promote somebody's speaker, and I don't think it worked. I think Tunde was going to talk about London, but I'll leave it to you, Wes. @ncfrontiersman: Yeah. Yeah. Mutahir here. @ncfrontiersman: I'm sorry if I'm not saying that right. I think they're up next. @NixFred: All right. You're the boss, man. Let's do it. @ncfrontiersman: And then we can get Tundy. So let me add as a speaker. All right. @ncfrontiersman: Let's see. Did that work? @NixFred: Hey, Lee, let's catch up again by video this week, okay, man? @NotJustShaking: Sure. @NixFred: All right, brother. Thank you, man. Love you, man. @ncfrontiersman: Let's see. @ncfrontiersman: Did that not work? Let's see. @NixFred: Yeah. I tried to promote Tunde and somebody else earlier, and it just dismissed it. So I don't know. @ncfrontiersman: Okay. All right. If you want to speak, just request again, and let's try and see if it'll work. @ncfrontiersman: I'm going to try Tundy. @NixFred: I wonder if we can promote to speaker. @ncfrontiersman: Yeah. I'm hitting invite to speak, but it's not doing anything. @NixFred: Uh-oh. Well, we might have to carry that. @ncfrontiersman: Oh, there we go. Wait. Got a question. @ncfrontiersman: Let's see. Tundy. @ncfrontiersman: There we go. Tunde's a speaker. @ncfrontiersman: Oh, and Mutahir is a speaker as well. Okay. Mutahir: This is Mutahir. @ncfrontiersman: Mutahir. All right. All right. @ncfrontiersman: Head it up. What's going on? @ncfrontiersman: What's going on? Mutahir: I think this is the first time I'm joining your space over here. And Fred was mentioning me in a DM that, "Mutahir, you have to join." So you guys can hear me, or? @NixFred: Oh, yeah. Yeah. You sound great. Mutahir: So I'm originally from Pakistan, but I was living in London before. I was studying there. I was working there. Mutahir: Then I went back to Pakistan. Then I got a job, and I moved to the Netherlands. Mutahir: So I'm currently based in the Netherlands. I have two kids. Mutahir: I'm married. I was born in 1978, so I don't know. Mutahir: That makes me 47, 48. @NixFred: Yep. Yeah. We'll get up there. Mutahir: And yeah, I started my career in IT in 1999, I believe. And it was with Networks first, Ericsson Tigris, and things like that. Then I did some of Solaris, then a lot of Microsoft in between with exchange servers and databases servers. Mutahir: Then my interest and passion was the storage industry. So I did a lot of work on NetApp, Hitachi. Mutahir: And then I was working as a solution architect as well at one point in life. But nowadays, I'm working as an SRE kind of thing at a US company in the Netherlands. Mutahir: So over there, I'm doing infrastructure support and escalation and things like that. @NixFred: Yeah. Cool. How did you find Omarchy? @NixFred: And what is this for? Mutahir: Well, I've been a distro hopper all my life. So I was always into Unix-like systems or Linux-like systems. So when I saw Omarchy and DHH and all that, and I thought, "Okay, this looks different." Mutahir: And the one thing I liked about when DHH was doing the YouTube video, the first one he did, was that previously, we would have Linux distributions coming out left, right, and center, and they will say, "Okay, you can have a Mac-like theme. It works like Mac." Mutahir: Or you can see it's themed in a Windows kind of way. But what I liked about DHH's video is that he never said anything because Omarchy has its own personality. Mutahir: It's not like that it's trying to become a Mac or a Windows. I don't know if I'm clear. Mutahir: I mean, maybe I'm going too fast. But what I mean is it's not like we are trying to be something else. Mutahir: So Mac has its own pros and cons. Windows, every operating system is good. Mutahir: I don't hate any operating system. But I liked Omarchy because of the keyboard-driven thing as well and the tiling window manager. Mutahir: And it's based on Arch. So I have used Arch before, but not heavily. Mutahir: It was only a few times. But yeah. Mutahir: And of course, it's installed very quickly. And then you are at the get-go. Mutahir: You don't have to do much, right? @NixFred: Yeah. You make a really good point that all the distros have been, "Here's a brand new distro. You can make it just like Mac." Mutahir: Yeah. So people would release themes and icons and things like that. If you remember, there was a time they even released Lindos. @NixFred: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. @NixFred: So I think the transition for Omarchy is that we don't want to be like that anymore. And traditionally, distros would try to say, "We're a new distro, but I'm going to reach down and make it like Windows or make it like Mac." @NixFred: And I think that we have completely decided as an Omarchy community, we don't want that. We're going in our own direction now. Mutahir: Yeah. I mean, it's good as it is, right? And especially with all of this AI and development thing, I'm not a pro software developer myself, but yes, I was working with Claude and Codex on CLI a few times. Mutahir: And then I started making plugins for Omarchy. I made two plugins. Mutahir: One was the config sync. It's called Oma Vault. Mutahir: And the other one I think I did was I will share the link later on. @NixFred: Awesome. Mutahir: But yeah. So it's good. I mean, I also submitted a wallpaper in the heritage theme of Bill Joy because that's one of my favorite legends from that IT industry or Silicon Valley. Mutahir: He used to work. He was a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, Bill Joy, and he was the creator of VI Editor. @NixFred: Nice. Nice. Nice. Mutahir: So when DHH announced that we are going to make this theme, so I said, "Okay, man, nobody has mentioned Bill Joy. I will go with Bill Joy." @NixFred: That's right. That's right. Well, man, thank you for speaking up and dropping in. Mutahir: Thank you for giving me the time and invitation as well. But it's good to catch up. And Lee, really moved by the way you were using it and everything. Mutahir: And man, all the best wishes to you. So if you want to talk or anything, you can just ping us. @NixFred: Nice. Mutahir: Thank you, bud. @NixFred: Love it. Fantastic. All right. @NixFred: Wes, I'll yield to you, man. Take over. @ncfrontiersman: Yeah. @NixFred: Tundy, I think you're up, man. I want to hear about how Omarchy London went. I saw some pictures. @NixFred: Maybe there was a video, but you had a few talks. @NixFred: Do you want to tell us about how that went? @thetundeo: Hello. Hello. Can you hear me? @NixFred: Absolutely. Coming in. @thetundeo: Thank you. Good evening, gentlemen. Evening, everyone. @thetundeo: Okay. It was a good event. @thetundeo: And well, I guess to everyone, I'm Tundy. I'm from London. @thetundeo: I run a software company. @NixFred: Hey, buddy. Let me just jump in a little, okay? @thetundeo: Whoops. How about now? @NixFred: Much better. @thetundeo: Okay. Sorry. I said I'm Tundy. @thetundeo: I'm from London. I run a company here called ZeroRAM, and we host the Omarchy London meetups. @thetundeo: Well, officially, I can say that now because the meetup actually happened. So I think we had about 60 or so people that registered and about 35 people turned up. @NixFred: Wow. @thetundeo: And yeah, it was surprising, honestly. And that's 35 or 37 minus the organizers, which was just about three of us. And we had four speakers, myself included, and various people did turn up. @thetundeo: Some people who'd been using the platform from the beginning. I saw a guy who had an Omarchy hoodie on. @thetundeo: And so obviously, when he walked in, I was just in stitches. I was laughing when I saw the guy. @thetundeo: And some people who had heard about it, but I just never used the platform or the OS. So the speakers, we had Mehmet from the Omarchy security team. @thetundeo: We had a gentleman called Gavin Nugent, who runs a YouTube channel called No Signal. I encourage you to go watch that channel. @thetundeo: He's a good guy. And we had Tristan, who is the maker of Cloud DIR and Rencal. @thetundeo: And then we had myself at the end. So Mehmet was able to talk about what constitutes a vulnerability, how the team is set up, and how they go about resolving vulnerabilities and cascading it. @thetundeo: Was it cascading now or moving it upstream? And obviously, this conversation ended with encouraging responsible disclosure. @thetundeo: Nobody should really just go on X and just disrepute or cast aspersions on Omarchy, maybe to get attention or something. But they do get a lot of issues. @thetundeo: They identify the vulnerabilities, and they fix them. And one thing he did stress was because now they've got a kernel engineer in their team, there are fixes they can make to the Omarchy kernel within two days, even before it makes it to mainstream. @thetundeo: And that was incredible. And I think whenever we find people talking down the platform, we should just be able to throw those things at them and just respond in kind or not. @thetundeo: And so it was very good. That was Mehmet's session. @thetundeo: Then Gavin's session was incredible. I do say in the company, I use Omarchy. @thetundeo: My CTO uses Omarchy. My developers use Omarchy. @thetundeo: But the designers and marketers, they don't. They're on Mac. @thetundeo: Now, what Gavin is doing is Gavin is basically building an Adobe Creative Suite for Omarchy, like everything. Lightroom, Adobe Premiere, everything. @thetundeo: Literally everything. And Gavin is special because Gavin's been in post-production for 30 years. @thetundeo: Can you imagine that? He ran his own post-prod company. @thetundeo: He's been around for ages. And so he's doing everything, and he's going to start releasing it. @thetundeo: If he didn't release it last week, maybe he's going to start releasing the first thing from next week. But he's going to do everything end to end. @thetundeo: So he's used all the platforms. He knows what worked. @thetundeo: He knows what's broken. He's going to fix everything, and he's going to release it. @thetundeo: So Omarchy is going to be available even for the creatives. So it's not just for the nerds anymore, even for the creatives to do design work, edit videos, everything. @thetundeo: He's building that. So I'm very, very excited about that one. @thetundeo: Then Rencal, the guy who he's built Rencal. Rencal is a calendar application native to Omarchy. @thetundeo: And his philosophy is he builds his applications based on text-based data stores because agents find it easy to interact with those kind of systems. So he also brought a Game Boy that was running Omarchy. @NixFred: Oh, that's awesome. @thetundeo: Yeah, which I found very funny. So those were the three main speakers. I just talked about the work I did to build a plugin to configure my cameras, etc., etc. @thetundeo: So no plugins. I'll start in there. @thetundeo: All in all, that's it. @ncfrontiersman: That's wonderful. So my question is, outside of the talks, what was the atmosphere like? For those of us that haven't been to an Omarchy meetup, what's it like? @ncfrontiersman: You kind of get a little early, you sit down, you grab a snack or a drink or something. Are people sharing with each other what they're building? @ncfrontiersman: Are they saying, "Hey, come look at my laptop. Look what I've got going"? @thetundeo: Yeah. Yeah. Because I think nerds are nerds in the end. @thetundeo: And I think we tend to be a bit shy to start conversations. But then when you find one or two people, you then just talk to those one or two people throughout the meeting. @thetundeo: So even I had to come out of my comfort zone and be talking to everyone around. But people did get talking. @thetundeo: And there was a guy who had a game that he'd built, and he was showing it off to a few people there. @ncfrontiersman: I love it. @thetundeo: After the talk. But the Game Boy was a hit. The Game Boy was such a hit. @ncfrontiersman: Yeah. Now I got to go get one of those. Is it one of those retro, remade ones? @ncfrontiersman: Or is it not an actual original Game Boy, but like, "Oh, man, I need to get one of those"? @NixFred: On a Game Boy, if you think about it, you've got the arrow keys, and you've got three other keys. So on a OS that has gotten away from mouse, it still makes sense. Pretty cool. @thetundeo: Yeah. Yeah. It was a good meet. @thetundeo: So next time will be in two months. And I want to get to Denmark, to Copenhagen tomorrow to see how they run theirs over there and hopefully talk David into coming for the next London one. @thetundeo: So that's my game plan for this week. @ncfrontiersman: Wonderful. Well, thanks for the update, man. I'm so glad it went well. @ncfrontiersman: And it's one of those things, it's going to be a long tail on it. So you may see it drop a little next week because I'm used to run meetups all the time. @ncfrontiersman: But on the long tail, I bet the thing is going to grow and grow and grow. And there's just something about the Omarchy community of builders and tinkerers. @ncfrontiersman: And let me help you. Show me what you did here. @ncfrontiersman: I just got a feeling it's going to be huge. So I appreciate what you're doing. @ncfrontiersman: Keep going, man. @thetundeo: Thank you, sir. @ncfrontiersman: All right. @NixFred: Great leadership, Tundy. That's not an easy thing to do in your business. Busy business owner. @NixFred: We're taking this on too. So we appreciate it, man. @ncfrontiersman: Let's see. Anybody else want to speak up? You don't have to have anything cool to share. @ncfrontiersman: You can just introduce yourself. Let's see. @ncfrontiersman: Kathryn, I'm just going to start calling names. And if y'all want to. @NixFred: I'm Steve Basti. I'm calling Basti. @ncfrontiersman: Basti. Yep. Let's see. @ncfrontiersman: I see Kathryn, Basti, PC Callout, Andre. @NixFred: Come on, Kathryn. @ncfrontiersman: Everybody. Let's see. Victoria. @NixFred: We got one wonder. @ncfrontiersman: All right. Victoria, what's going on? @NixFred: There he comes. @ncfrontiersman: You have the mic. @NixFred: Yep. You got to unmute me. And while he's unmuting, everybody follow everybody. @NixFred: I'm following everybody's caption. You got to unmute yourself, Victoria. @ncfrontiersman: All right. And then after that, we got the real dark horse as well. Okay, Victoria. @BlackOpsREPL: Hi, everyone. So yeah, my name is Victorio. I'm a programmer from Italy. @BlackOpsREPL: I live in Milan. And I use Linux since about 20 years. @BlackOpsREPL: And I was always an Italian window manager user. So for me, it was basically very easy to start using Omarchy because it's the first distro that is beautiful and that has a setup stock, so to speak. @BlackOpsREPL: I asked for the mic for one moment because I have noticed that there is no meetup for Italy. Like there to be a meetup in Milan. @ncfrontiersman: Yeah. @BlackOpsREPL: So basically, I'm just starting to signal it because I've decided it just today that I would like to host it if any of that sponsors it because that's the most difficult part. I will try to ask around. And also, maybe some Italian people are listening to me right now. @BlackOpsREPL: If you want to DM me so we can organize it and propose it if we make it because it would be very interesting. So that's basically the reason. @ncfrontiersman: Wonderful. Yeah. I mean, I think that's kind of how it happened with Tundy. @ncfrontiersman: Tundy was like, "You know what? I think I might want to do " and then now he's talking about the four different talks that happened and how well it went. @ncfrontiersman: So I think you should do it. I think you'll have the backing that you need. @ncfrontiersman: Just kind of step out on faith a little bit, and I bet you'll be met. So I really do. @ncfrontiersman: I think that's awesome. I think there's probably a lot of Italian developers and non-developers alike that are using Omarchy. @ncfrontiersman: I know when I did my little tiny weather app, I got a lot of people asking, "When do you support the weather radar in Italy?" And I was like, "Oh, wow. @ncfrontiersman: Yeah. I guess a lot of people." @ncfrontiersman: So yeah, I'd say go for it. I think it's great. @BlackOpsREPL: Thank you. I will. And then additionally, I hope this is a PR. @BlackOpsREPL: Since my main activity nowadays is developing a planning problem solver-like application. It allows you to solve any planning problem like scheduling, routing of vehicles. @BlackOpsREPL: And I would love it to be on Omarchy. That's also why I proposed to Lee. @BlackOpsREPL: I want to also spread the word about that. It's an interesting type of AI that is different from the generative one. @BlackOpsREPL: And so just to say, I have two PRs in. I don't know if they will get accepted, but I will also do user applications for Omarchy with this. @BlackOpsREPL: So that will come too. So this is what I propose, things that I would like to do. @ncfrontiersman: Yeah. So many ideas, so little time, right? @BlackOpsREPL: Yeah. @ncfrontiersman: I think we all have that problem now. It's like, "What do we focus on?" Well, thanks for speaking up. @ncfrontiersman: And yeah, I hope good luck with kicking off Omarchy Milan or Omarchy Italy or whatever you want to call it. I think it's going to be awesome. @BlackOpsREPL: Yeah. Milan would already be a grid issue for Italy. Italy could be the next step. @ncfrontiersman: Yeah, yeah. Gotcha. Okay. @ncfrontiersman: All right. Well, let's see. @ncfrontiersman: I've got a few people lined up. I don't know if I'm going to do this in the right order, but Chris, I think you're up. @NixFred: My man. What's up, brother? @OnTheLiftAI: Hey. Can you guys hear me good? @NixFred: Oh, yeah. @OnTheLiftAI: Perfect. It's not too loud. I'm just trying not to use my headphones. @OnTheLiftAI: Awesome. Well, basically, I just want to introduce myself. @OnTheLiftAI: My name is Chris. My main focus in life right now has been in the automotive space and bringing AI to automotive dealerships as far as diagnostic tools, all sorts of cool stuff that we use every day. @OnTheLiftAI: But one thing that Omarchy has done for me is it's not just an operating system. And I made a post about it earlier thanking you, Wes and Nix and TechLuddite about helping me get through that mindset of slow it down, build it right, build methodically. @OnTheLiftAI: And Omarchy, like I said, it's more than just an operating system. It's a whole community. @OnTheLiftAI: You can just feel the love and the passion from DHH and everybody in this group. It's just a wonderful place to be. @OnTheLiftAI: It's a nice place to clear your mind. And no, I just really appreciate these Sunday meetups. @OnTheLiftAI: I absolutely love it. I just want to say thank you. @NixFred: Amen. Go ahead, Wes. @ncfrontiersman: No, I was just going to say thank you for being here. Thank you for your presence. And I'm all about slow. @ncfrontiersman: AI, it's one of those things where you always have this feeling, "Oh, I could be kicking another agent off. I could be spending more tokens or building." @ncfrontiersman: But honestly, the best things come from the moment you step away and clear your head and think, "What's something I could solve? What's something that's bothering me right now?" @ncfrontiersman: And then you go back and tackle it. Because you'll find plenty of things to be busy about, but there's a difference between being busy and making progress. @ncfrontiersman: So I love it. @OnTheLiftAI: Exactly. Exactly. You start to focus on the features rather than the issue you started off trying to fix. @ncfrontiersman: Right. And AI makes you think that what you're doing all the time is amazing because it's like an amplification, right? So you have to be very careful with that. @ncfrontiersman: And so you got to maintain that control, that agency about yourself. And it's wonderful. @ncfrontiersman: I'm not anti-AI at all. I think it's a wonderful tool. @ncfrontiersman: But it'll lead you down any path. @OnTheLiftAI: Yeah. If I eat rocks, will it get rid of my headache? Yes. @OnTheLiftAI: I'd absolutely try to eat this. But no. @OnTheLiftAI: There's still some thinking you need to do here. @ncfrontiersman: Yep. Yep. Totally. @ncfrontiersman: But yeah, I love it. And I hope now, and I'm sure you are, you can start to help other people too. @ncfrontiersman: We should all be building each other up. That's the whole point here. @OnTheLiftAI: Exactly. It's a community. It's family. @ncfrontiersman: Yep. That's right. @NixFred: Enjoy your post, Chris. Keep it coming, man. @OnTheLiftAI: All right. I'm not going to slow down in that area, but I'll slow down when it comes to building. @NixFred: There we go. @OnTheLiftAI: All right. Thank you, guys. @NixFred: Thanks, guys. @NixFred: All right. Who got up next? @NixFred: Dark horse. What do you got, man? @NixFred: Good to see your face. Jeff: Hey, everyone. Can you hear me okay? @NixFred: You bet, brother. Jeff: Great. Well, hey, I want to reiterate those sentiments. Thank you guys for hosting these Sunday socials. Jeff: I was on last week just as a listener, but I pretty much followed everyone in the conversation. And boy, did I get a lot of information this week from all you guys. Jeff: You're great. So it's really appreciated. Jeff: I'll keep this pretty short because I know there's a lot of people that want to speak. But my real name is Jeff, and I'm a retired engineer. Jeff: I used to live in the Silicon Valley for about 25 years. And now I'm out in eastern Arizona. Jeff: And needless to say, there's more pine trees out here than technology. @NixFred: That's not bad. Jeff: I tried to start an Omarchy meetup. We had our first meeting Thursday last week. And it's just at the local Starbucks over here in Sholo, Arizona. Jeff: And by the way, the story is true. Sholo was named after a drawing of cards over property rights. Jeff: And some guy drew a deuce of clubs, and that's how Sholo got its name. Jeff: So I've been using Linux since the mid-'90s. I don't know if anyone remembers the Yggdrasil distro, YGGdrizzle distro. Jeff: Anyway, it was on like 20 floppy disks. And boy, that was fun days back then. Jeff: So yeah, up here, it's mostly country life, not much tech. But it's been great to reach out and see you guys here and learn about it. Jeff: I did two things I just want to share this week. One is I bought a brand new PC off of Facebook Marketplace. Jeff: New to me. I guess it was a used one. Jeff: And I got it for real cheap. I got it home, put Omarchy on it first thing, which installed perfectly and fast. Jeff: And I did see a lot of spam in my system log. Jeff: I just dropped. Yeah. @ncfrontiersman: My phone must have dropped it out. The screen went white. And yeah, we'll get there. @ncfrontiersman: All right. Maybe just one more minute and everybody will hop back in, and then we can get back started. Jeff: Sure. Where did we cut off? @ncfrontiersman: Let me think here. You were talking about Linux distro, and then after that, you said you had built. Jeff: A PC? @ncfrontiersman: Yeah. Yeah. That's right. @ncfrontiersman: You bought a PC. Yeah. @ncfrontiersman: Got a good deal on it, and it installed right away. That's about where we left off. Jeff: Okay. Cool. @ncfrontiersman: All right. Let me make Fred a host. Yeah. @ncfrontiersman: You can go ahead and start. Jeff: Yeah. A riser cable. Anyway, AI pointed to that. Jeff: And so sure enough, I bought a new one off of Amazon, and it fixed it. I mean, I would not have known to look for the things that AI was looking for. Jeff: And I was just using the standard big pickle model. And I was just amazed. Jeff: And that's probably why I got the PC for so cheap. It must have been crashing on the previous owner. @ncfrontiersman: I love it. I love that in this new world, things don't have to go to waste. You know what I mean? @ncfrontiersman: I think there's plenty of goodwills with some things sitting on shelves that need to be bought and brought back to life. Jeff: Yeah. And I'm mostly a local model kind of guy. I mean, I have a Gemini app, Gemini subscription at five bucks a month. Jeff: But I'm retired, so I'm trying to keep my costs down. And it's more of a hobby than for work. Jeff: But I do have an M4 Mac Studio, 128 gig, running a Qwen 3.8 27B model. And that's pretty good. Jeff: And so just last night, there's a YouTube channel called the Linux Saloon with Kieran and a bunch of guys. And they had a guy on there that had an open-source CAD program called BREP, B-R-E-P. Jeff: I can post a link if people are interested. Anyway, it has an MCP server built into the CAD. Jeff: And as a test, I thought, "Oh, this is going to be fun," because I do a lot of 3D printing and stuff. So I created a and I'm kind of new to AI still. Jeff: I'm still trying to understand skills and all that. But I created a file, a skill file, all about Legos. Jeff: What are the dimensions of a Lego? What are the wall thickness? Jeff: How tall are the stubs on a Lego? That kind of thing. Jeff: So I created a skill set. And now I had AI. Jeff: I was using the Qwen model on my Mac to Omarchy. And I had it direct the CAD to generate a set of eight Lego bricks. Jeff: And it did it perfectly. I exported it as an STL file and then printed it on my Bamboo Studio 3D printer. Jeff: And I was just sitting there in my chair, scratching my chin, going, "Wow, that is pretty crazy." @ncfrontiersman: Wow. Yeah. Yeah. @ncfrontiersman: That's awesome. I mean, yeah. @ncfrontiersman: I mean, people use 3D printers to make replacement parts for appliances and gadgets you got laying around. So it'd probably be even easier now with something like that. Jeff: Yeah. And I was just using the Legos as just to test things out. But I'm sure you can tell it more complex parts, and it'll look it up on the web and figure out how to create it. @ncfrontiersman: So cool, man. Jeff: But yeah. So anyway, that's pretty cool. And that's where I'm at now. Jeff: I'm really loving Omarchy. I wrote a few plugins. Jeff: I got to polish them up a little bit. They're my first attempts at it. Jeff: But I did something called Radio Garden. So that Radio Atlas plugin that was so popular. Jeff: There's a website called radio.garden. And so I created a plugin that just drops down a little web viewer of that site. Jeff: And so it's just like Radio Atlas, only color with more channels. And so that's pretty cool. @ncfrontiersman: Love it. Jeff: But yeah, I'm having a lot of fun. And like other people have said, I really enjoy the community. Everybody's really cool. Jeff: Let's keep the train rolling. @ncfrontiersman: Yeah. Let's do it. Let's do it. @ncfrontiersman: Well, thanks. It's nice to meet you. Jeff: Yeah. Thank you. @ncfrontiersman: Yeah. All right. Well, let's see. @ncfrontiersman: We got time for maybe one or two more. Tim, I think you're up. @tim_sonner: Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Mic check. @ncfrontiersman: I can hear you. Sound great. @tim_sonner: Awesome. Well, yeah, I want to say great job, Jeff, just picking up. That was like we didn't even miss a beat. @tim_sonner: And yeah, thanks, everybody, for being here. This is my first Sunday social. @tim_sonner: I just happened to see it in my feed and was like, "Ah, if I have time, I'll drop by." And just awesome. @tim_sonner: What I really love about Omarchy is this community, right? And I think I've been using Linux for like 20-plus years on and off, right, as like a basic user. @tim_sonner: I've done a lot of blue-collar work. I just recently got into kind of the more tech field in like 2022. @tim_sonner: But I've always been using Linux personally. And so I've distro hopped a lot. @tim_sonner: I've installed Linux on a ton of different OSes or a ton of different hardwares. And so I have a lot of experience with that. @tim_sonner: And I was at work, I don't know, like six weeks ago, I've been using Omarchy, right? So it's like a week after Quattro came out. @tim_sonner: And I heard some guys I'd seen it in the news feed, and I was like, "Oh, that's kind of cool. I might want to check it out." @tim_sonner: But some of the guys I work with, some of the younger guys, right, are talking about it. And I'm like, "I know Linux. @tim_sonner: I think I know Linux." And I'm like, "Well, maybe I should try it out." @tim_sonner: I've never used a tiling window manager. I've never used Hyprland. @tim_sonner: I've always used GNOME. And anyway, so I think that what really got me into Omarchy and kind of Omarchy pilled was the ease of installation, right? @tim_sonner: I mean, I followed the standard, throw it on an ISO, boot, install. And it was just like within two minutes, I'm like in the OS. @tim_sonner: And the main friction for me, having not used a tiling window manager before, was learning the key bindings. But once I got those 12 key bindings down, it's just I'm still a little bit rusty on it, but it's a great window manager. @tim_sonner: And I think that that's kind of like the selling point for a lot of people is I love this repurposing potatoes kind of mentality that we have. And I think that that's a strong selling point for the Omarchy movement. @tim_sonner: And yeah, I just wanted to just, yeah, say that. That was what really made Omarchy stick for me, I guess. @tim_sonner: I use Linux. I use Ubuntu like 40 hours a week for work. @tim_sonner: I use personally Omarchy because it was just like the install was so frictionless. It was so good. @tim_sonner: And I was like, "This is awesome." And then so about that same time, right, I'd used Grok a little bit. @tim_sonner: I hadn't really been on X that much. So about that same time, it's like, "Okay, I jump on X. @tim_sonner: I start using Grok more." And then it's like I see the community around this. @tim_sonner: And I'm like, "This is awesome. I found my home. @tim_sonner: I found my people." And all of this kind of happened, catalyzed all at once. @tim_sonner: And so it's just awesome. So just keep doing what everybody's doing. @tim_sonner: I'm a very simple user, right? I feel like there's all these plugins that solve very niche things. @tim_sonner: And that's a beautiful ecosystem, right? It's like the ocean. @tim_sonner: There's just a little there's a niche for everybody. And I love to see people finding that. @tim_sonner: And yeah, just keep it up. Keep doing what we're doing. @tim_sonner: I think we're on a good pace. @ncfrontiersman: Amen to that. That's awesome. Yeah. @ncfrontiersman: The key binding thing is interesting. And I see Porsche requested. @ncfrontiersman: So you're up next, Porsche. But the key binding thing, at first, I was like, "I don't know if I can do this," point and click for years. @ncfrontiersman: But I said, "I'll give it a day." And then about a day into it, all of a sudden, I'm like, "How in the world am I remembering these key bindings?" @ncfrontiersman: It's almost like second nature. It's like, "Oh, I'm just going to open a browser. @ncfrontiersman: Oh, I'm going to open a terminal up. Oh, I'm going to open X up." @ncfrontiersman: And it's just instant. There's no latency. @ncfrontiersman: And I'm all about it, so. @NixFred: And it's also how disposable the windows are now for me. I just do one thing, open it, do it, close it, bang. @ncfrontiersman: Yeah. You don't have these long-running tabs and things. Yeah. @ncfrontiersman: Well, it's great to have you. Nice to meet you, Tim. @ncfrontiersman: And let's see. Porsche, you're up. Porsche: Hello. I'm so happy that we're. @NixFred: I am too. We have women in it. This is awesome. @NixFred: Thank you so much for joining. Porsche: Well, that's not why I'm happy. @NixFred: Well, that's why. Porsche: I love talking about Linux. I started using Linux almost 20 years ago. I was living in China, and I couldn't find a legal copy of Microsoft. Porsche: And it wasn't like I wanted Bill Gates to get his money, but I wanted a stable system. And I was tired of buying fake Microsoft operating systems. Porsche: And so that's when I got into Ubuntu, and that's when I got into Mint. But along the way, I became a software developer. Porsche: And so many folks, so many places I worked use Mac. And Omarchy has given me an excuse to put Linux on my computer, and it's been great. Porsche: This is my first time using tiles as well and using multiple windows. I'm wondering, so I actually have Hermes Agent on Omarchy. Porsche: How are folks using AI tooling and agents such as Grokbot and Hermes Agent on their Omarchy machine? @ncfrontiersman: Yeah. That's a great question. Anybody want to you want to have a quick one-minute, two-minute tell us how you're using agents? @ncfrontiersman: I mean, I can tell you how I am. I'm sure Fred can, but I want to hear from other people. @ncfrontiersman: If you want to, raise your hand. Let's see. @ncfrontiersman: There's got to be somebody. Jeff: I could chime in real quick. @ncfrontiersman: Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead, Jeff. Jeff: Hey, Porsche. This is Jeff. Yeah. Jeff: So I don't know if you heard before, but I use agents to help me debug my system. Or say you want to change the appearance of your UI, if instead of square corners, you want round corners. Jeff: You can just use I use OpenCode. That's the one I'm most familiar with. Jeff: And you can just tell it, "Hey, on my windows, round the corners." And it's smart enough because it has the skills. Jeff: There's skill files already on Omarchy that tells it how to interact with the Hyprland window manager. And so it does a lot of things like that. Jeff: I'm still trying to get it to use things like Gemini and stuff and to do things in parallel. Probably Wes or Fred can do that better. Jeff: But I see a lot of people using multiple agents at the same time, and they're doing parallel tasks, which is just mind-boggling. @ncfrontiersman: Yeah. Well, you don't have to do that. The jury's still out on whether that actually makes you more productive, in my opinion. @ncfrontiersman: But I'm a little bit of an old school in that regard. But yeah, that's cool. @ncfrontiersman: Let's see. We got Colin. @ncfrontiersman: Colin? @cfaulkingham: Yeah. Can you hear me? @ncfrontiersman: Yeah. @cfaulkingham: Yeah. I just want to echo that the built-in skill. @NixFred: Speak up, brother. @cfaulkingham: With the built-in skill for Omarchy, using agents is so refreshing on these computers compared to a Mac. I mean, it understands, because of the skill, what you can do. So I have done extensive debugging. @cfaulkingham: I just recently installed Kua Hyper, and it was on the it was messing around with Hyprland and causing problems with different machines. And I had one of my agents debug it, and it fixed it. @cfaulkingham: I mean, that's what's so mind-blowing about this whole thing is the integration with the skill. I would love to see it go even further. @cfaulkingham: I don't know exactly what, but just sort of make it the core around Omarchy because it just works so well. And of course, I'm a software developer, and I do all my coding. @cfaulkingham: And I use multiple different agents to do that. So I like to sort of bounce around. @cfaulkingham: The CLIs are, I think, a lot easier to use in Omarchy, from OpenCode to Grok to Grok Build to Claude Code CLI or Codex CLI. But yeah, so I just wanted to say that the built-in skill is probably the killer feature here. @ncfrontiersman: Yeah. Yeah. It's the built-in skill plus the fact that almost all of the apps and programs and packages that are installed are configurable with open clear TOML or config files, which is completely different than a Mac or Windows, right, where you're having to go mess around and remember the old what was it called? @ncfrontiersman: It's been years, the registry. Yeah. @ncfrontiersman: Or just all of the PList files and all that. With Omarchy, they're just clear text, and you just edit it, and the thing reloads. @ncfrontiersman: So it's perfect for agents. @cfaulkingham: I mean, that whole agent plugin that is bundled with Omarchy. I've modified mine. I just asked it to add Grok and DeepSeek. @cfaulkingham: I mean, that's the great thing. Yeah. @cfaulkingham: Yeah. Any of the plugins you don't like the way it does whatever? @cfaulkingham: Fine. Change it. @ncfrontiersman: Yeah. That's right. That's right. Jeff: Yeah. I didn't even know what a skill file was. And in your home directory, there's a .agents hidden folder, and inside there is skills. Jeff: And you can go in there and look at them. And like Wes was saying, they're human-readable. Jeff: I think they're just Markdown files, right? MD files. Jeff: And you can look at them, and you can enhance. I haven't had the courage to enhance any of them yet, but you could add to them to give it even more skills, right? Jeff: Pretty cool. @ncfrontiersman: Yeah. Totally. It's a whole new world. @ncfrontiersman: Well, let's see. I think Tech Luddite, you're up. @ncfrontiersman: And then Fred, is there anybody else? @NixFred: I don't know. We'll see. Let's hear from Tech Luddite. @ncfrontiersman: Okay. @gh_TechLuddite: Hey, everyone. I'm very late to the party, but I'm glad I got to hear from a few people. And as always, I'm bursting and want to say a million things. @gh_TechLuddite: But I just wanted to reply to Porsche's question. I am not a Hermes expert. @gh_TechLuddite: I have three different installations in different ways. But I think maybe the most important thing for me to share about Hermes in my very amateur place is just know that it does things on its own, by design. @gh_TechLuddite: It does more that you don't explicitly tell it to. Presently, I'm using was five, now six harnesses because I'm trying to learn the harnesses individually, and I use them co-working on individual projects or separately in projects on dedicated windows. @gh_TechLuddite: And it is not efficient, but it's how I like to work. Now, I am needing to get into automating some things and using local models more. @gh_TechLuddite: So I'm going to try a proper setup. That's my third installation of Hermes. @gh_TechLuddite: It's meant to be typical, but I have dedicated a separate working folder to it because I feel the default installation location with Omarchy is just not I'm not okay with it. And again, this is probably me just not knowing enough, but something I wanted to share. @gh_TechLuddite: And every one of my three installations and all the research and testing I've done is kind of like by design and intended for you to do much more and have that kind of carry out on its own. Whereas often with a harness, especially if you have good system instructions or system prompt, if you have that access to the backend, you can be more firm. @gh_TechLuddite: They're soft guardrails, of course, as always when a harness has a lot of control. Okay. @gh_TechLuddite: I'm going to stop now because I just want to talk forever. That's all I want to say. @gh_TechLuddite: Hermes does a lot. Be careful where you put it or spend some time learning what it does on its own. @gh_TechLuddite: That's my advice. Porsche: So I've been working with Hermes for almost a month now. So are you getting the bots or profiles to huddle? And are you using the Kanban feature? Porsche: That's actually what I'm testing right now while I'm listening to you guys. I'm actually testing the Kanban feature where it actually carries out tasks on its own and creates sub-agents. Porsche: It's pretty cool. @ncfrontiersman: Oh, that sounds cool. @gh_TechLuddite: That sounds amazing. And I saw the Kanban. Thank you for mentioning that because I don't know if that was a recent release, but I saw it on a feed today, and I want to look at it. @gh_TechLuddite: And I say it does a lot automatically. I'm overly paranoid. @gh_TechLuddite: It's like the memory thing that it does. Command code does a lot of paste building and puts things in places that may not be exactly where you want it, or it might go in places that you may not want it to go. @gh_TechLuddite: That might be a better way to say what I far fewer words to say what I wanted to convey. Hopefully, that's it. @ncfrontiersman: So for those that haven't used Hermes, Hermes is like open cloth sort of, but better, I've heard. Is that true? It's like you install it on your computer, and then it runs as a service, and you can give it access to do certain things autonomously, kind of like Grokbot. @ncfrontiersman: And then you can talk to it through Telegram or WhatsApp, or is that close to what it is? Porsche: Yeah. I have my Hermes agent attached to Telegram, which is amazing. So I have a Hermes agent. Porsche: It is attached to Telegram, and I'm also hosting it on a private server, well, on Hostinger. So I have it on the cloud. Porsche: And just being able to talk to it in different I can talk to it in Hostinger. I can talk to it between Omarchy and Mac and Telegram, and the conversation persists. Porsche: So that's pretty cool. I'm experimenting with different sessions, and I like getting the different bots together and huddle. Porsche: I was able to create an HR bot, which giving the right amount of permission, making it very permissive and giving it a soul, I was able to get an HR bot to create other bots for a project without me prompting it. So I've been experimenting it a lot. Porsche: And yeah, I make videos about this stuff too. Kanban's been a lot for me to get my head around, but I've been having a lot of fun. @ncfrontiersman: So in that instance, you kind of work like a virtual project team, and you're like, "Hey, here's some work. Let's split it out into tickets." And then you create virtual cards, and then the Hermes agents picks them up and works on them. @ncfrontiersman: And there's a feedback loop for each one where it reviews it. Is that kind of what the point is? Porsche: Yeah. I like to be super lazy. So I gave it this afternoon, I wanted it to create a presentation on domestic cats in the United States. Porsche: So I love cats. So it was able to take one ticket, and it split it into four different tickets without me doing anything. Porsche: And so I'm actually looking at the final product now, but it was able to project manage on its own. And yeah, no, I think it's pretty cool. @ncfrontiersman: Yeah. The interesting thing is it's honestly like context management. If you zoom out a little bit, what it's really doing because you could do it all in one session with Fable 5.1 or Opus 5.5 and be like, "Hey, do all this stuff," and then it goes off and figures it out. @ncfrontiersman: But this is forcing it to think about things in small iterative tasks that I think you get a much better result that way. So it's kind of cool how it forces you into that context engineering aspect of AI. Porsche: I don't force it at all. @ncfrontiersman: Well, yeah. I mean, yeah. Yeah. @ncfrontiersman: You're right. Porsche: Yes. I don't force it at all. And you can fine-tune things. Porsche: For instance, if the different bots are in I call it a huddle. When they're in one meeting room, you can tell it to give it five different chances to come up with a solution for a problem because if you make it unlimited, then they can actually burn all your tokens. Porsche: Each bot can have its own model. It's pretty cool, and I really like it. @ncfrontiersman: That's cool. Now I'm going to have to go play with that sometime. That sounds cool. @ncfrontiersman: Well, thanks for sharing, Porsche. It was nice to meet you. @ncfrontiersman: And yeah, I hope you stick around. And let's see. @ncfrontiersman: Snowy, I think you're up next. Snowy: Hello. Can you hear me okay? @ncfrontiersman: Yes. We sure can. Snowy: Yeah. Live from Scotland. @ncfrontiersman: All right. Snowy: Yeah. Oddly enough, I use Hermes quite a bit. And I was just going to chime in on what Porsche was saying, that it's really good if you have something that you need to split up. Snowy: So I have a comms manager that manages my social posts, and I have a researcher, and I have a reviewer, and I have a coach that tells me when I've not moved enough or if I've eaten too much and things like that. They're all done through there. Snowy: But the Kanban is really useful because you can set it off on different tasks, and one task, it'll then go and split it up, and it'll give it to the different bots. And you can have different bots with different models. Snowy: So you can have a researcher bot that's specifically using a model that is particularly good for research and things. So yeah, I do love that. Snowy: And the fact that I can just do I can just tell my Omarchy laptop just to say, "Look, make Super Shift H, my Hermes shortcut." So now when I press Super Shift H, Hermes opens up, and then I can stick it at my scratch. Snowy: And then anytime I'm doing anything, I can just click back to Hermes, see how it's getting on, and then move on. I really love the combination of that with Omarchy because the two of them seem to go really well together. Snowy: Yeah. I just wanted to chime in as soon as I've been. Snowy: This is the second time I've been to one of these and I haven't spoken yet. And I didn't want to miss the opportunity to actually say hello to all you lovely people when I have the chance this time. @ncfrontiersman: Well, hello. It's nice to meet you. And yeah, hopefully, you'll come back. @ncfrontiersman: We're going to do this as often as we can, once a week. So that's great, man. @ncfrontiersman: Let's see. Anybody else want to speak that hasn't spoken yet? @ncfrontiersman: Give you just a minute. Oh, yes. @ncfrontiersman: Linux Gamer. Gav: Hello. Yes. My name's Gav. Gav: I'm an IT infrastructure and operations director for a global pharmaceutical tech company in the UK. I live on a boat on the South Coast. Gav: I have interacted with Fred and Wes a few times on X. Hope you're all good. @ncfrontiersman: Yeah. We're all good, brother. Gav: Yeah. All good, man. All good. Gav: Thank you. For Porsche, though, so I do flit. Gav: My main harness was open code, to be fair, until actually yesterday, which I did start using Hermes a little bit. And I flip in terms of providers between Alarma and OpenCode Go, part of that's due to privacy, etc. Gav: But I guess the most relevant point most recently, I've set up my entire home lab, or I guess you could call it a boat lab, on two mini PC servers running NixOS and a Raspberry Pi running a PiHat for a NAS. So I used Omarchy specifically on my main laptop to set all that up for me. Gav: I'm hosting my own around 24 apps now. Again, some of you will have seen some of that on my feed probably because I've shared some stuff. Gav: Now, in terms of we talk about Kanban and ops and stuff there. So I run a daily ops standup with my agents that essentially run through my entire home lab stack, tell me what my situation is on my 3-2-1 backup strategy, any errors in the logs, networking, apps that are running, etc. Gav: So that's kind of what I'm using Hermes and OpenCode for. And I guess more generally, I'm a gamer. Gav: I kind of gave it away with the name, right? So I've been on Linux probably a couple of years now, and I was a serial distro hopper. Gav: So CachyOS, NixOS on my laptop as well. Started with Bazzite, actually. Gav: Didn't like the lockdown kind of method on that approach, so I moved on very quickly. That was probably my first unlike Ubuntu for most people. Gav: So I also hated the original version of Omarchy. Not going to lie. Gav: I'm a minimalist. However, I've moved to Omarchy Quattro from its launch, and I am now stuck on it. Gav: I am no longer a distro hopper. And yeah, it's ticking all the boxes from my minimalist needs as well. Gav: As soon as you remove those initial opinions. Gav: So yeah, no, I'm loving it. Hopefully, that's useful. @ncfrontiersman: Wonderful. Welcome. It's great to hear from you. @ncfrontiersman: Stay safe out there on the water. Gav: Cheers, man. Cheers, man. I'm particularly looking at your weather app just to keep an eye on those rain. Gav: I need some wind information on there. @ncfrontiersman: Yeah. Well, it's coming. There's a guy that did a PR for wind data, so I just got to find time to look at it. @ncfrontiersman: But it's coming for sure, so. Yeah. @ncfrontiersman: And there's a disclaimer, right? It's just for entertainment purposes only. @ncfrontiersman: My lawyers tell me I have to say that. I'm just kidding. @ncfrontiersman: No. @ncfrontiersman: Right. All right. @ncfrontiersman: Well, let's see. I think somebody else. @ncfrontiersman: Yeah. Kozha, you're up. Kozha: Yeah. Guys, hi, everybody. I'm really sorry. Kozha: I'm a bit busy since I'm completely reinstalling my Omarchy. Kozha: I asked in the X chat, "What's up? Why I can't?" Kozha: It sent me into a reboot loop. And then I got this little tiny text in the upper left corner, which said, "Yeah, no key for this password found." Kozha: And yeah, all the help said, as well as David also kindly answered me, they asked me if I tried to encrypt my hard drive, but I never, ever did to try to do this. Since I was already afraid to make this 2014 MacBook even slower, right? Kozha: And so yeah, right now, I'm on a full reinstall, and I need to get all my programs back here and so on and so forth. Kozha: How about you guys? @ncfrontiersman: Yeah. So something happened. It rebooted, and then it's like it wanted you to enter the password to decrypt the hard drive, but you're saying you never encrypted it. Kozha: Yeah. The thing what I suspect is since we have, for some reason, over this weekend, an incredibly unstable internet Wi-Fi here. And I installed it all over Wi-Fi, which is kind of stupid, I know, but I lacked the LAN adapter here. Kozha: Yeah. So anyways. Kozha: And yeah, now I got to do it. I have to do it all from the beginning, right? @ncfrontiersman: Yeah. @ncfrontiersman: Well, I tell you what. Yeah. @ncfrontiersman: If you want, we can talk through it more offline. I'm happy to help you too, so. @ncfrontiersman: And I'm sure others here would be willing to help. But that sucks. @ncfrontiersman: I know that feeling when you lose it and you have to reload. Kozha: Yeah. It sucks. But at the same time, of course, I don't want to bother 100 people now and to give me tech support, right? Kozha: This is not why I showed up here. I really had a great talk with Fred and David yesterday, and this was at my time here in Germany. Kozha: We were talking from 1-ish in the morning until 5 in the morning, and it was incredible. I'm too old to go out and party. Kozha: I don't do this anymore. But obviously, I'm old enough to stay awake until in the morning to talk about Omarchy. @ncfrontiersman: That was a lot of work. Kozha: And I'm also. @ncfrontiersman: Yeah. Kozha: Yeah. Sure. Sure. Kozha: I'm totally in. I'm totally in. @ncfrontiersman: Cool. Kozha: Great. @gh_TechLuddite: Wes, or Nix, do you mind if I reply to one thing? I'll make it very short. Shorter this time, I promise. @gh_TechLuddite: All right. Let me put my arm down here. Kozha: You don't even need to, Fred. Really, I enjoyed every second. I enjoyed every second. Kozha: As I told you yesterday, it was really a bliss, truly. And I don't say this out of kindness. Kozha: I really, really mean it. I mean, I'm German. Kozha: Germans don't say anything out of kindness, right? @gh_TechLuddite: Well, thank you. The bit of advice I had was check if and you may be past it already, but for others or future uses, you could check outside of that boot process if the disk is actually encrypted. And if it's not, the first place I would probably go in this type of scenario that I believe we're talking about is AC session logs. @gh_TechLuddite: So you get into the disk and go find whatever happened in the last five sessions. And you don't even have to analyze it yourself. @gh_TechLuddite: Just have an agent do it because that might tell you the whole story there. It felt like you didn't do anything. @gh_TechLuddite: You probably didn't. Could have been a Hermes install. @gh_TechLuddite: Could have been whatever. Kozha: Yeah. I tried to update Omarchy this afternoon, and I suspect that it got kind of stuck right in the middle and just broken it somehow, right? @gh_TechLuddite: There should be a checksum process after downloads in all of this with Omarchy, but I haven't vetted that myself. But sure, bad downloads, bad internet absolutely can cause big problems too when you're doing updates. Kozha: Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Kozha: For sure. Right. Kozha: But Omarchy itself is mind-blowing, really, because I wasn't around for Omarchy 3 or even Arch Linux in general. But when Omarchy Quattro came out, it gave me the chance as a noob to enter the Linux world. Kozha: And yeah, and I will never go back. Right now, literally, every computer in this household is exclusively running Omarchy. Kozha: My girlfriend asked me to do her laptops, to put it in dual boot mode. But after 24 hours later, now already, it was Omarchy exclusively because she was also such a fan. Kozha: Yeah. It's really the I think this is the OS of the future, right? Kozha: An OS which your agent, your personalized agent, will care about for you, unlike the other extreme, which in my mind is Windows. And Windows is like when you buy a Windows computer, it's like you buy a baby. Kozha: You need to, "Oh, I need to enter a virus. I need this. Kozha: I need that." And no, you can't go home now because I need to update. Kozha: And yes, you will wait for my update. And yeah, this is incredibly bad. Kozha: And also how slow it makes computers. I never expected these old computers to even function anymore at that pace. Kozha: And Omarchy does it left-handedly. Kozha: It's really I'm really mind-blown still. @ncfrontiersman: I love that description. It's like training wheels, right? Windows for baby, right? @ncfrontiersman: Just need to hold your hand as you go through it. But Omarchy is like, to be honest, the great thing about Omarchy is even if you don't have a lot of experience with Linux or whatever, it kind of ramps up with your level of ability with agents. @ncfrontiersman: So it's wonderful. Kozha: Now, Wes, I'm sorry. You broke up now. And I'm on 5G with my phone here right now, but even 5G seems like somehow to be corrupted today. Kozha: A very bad internet day in Cologne, Germany, obviously. So it must be my Wes, I'm sorry. Kozha: I couldn't hear what you said. Can you come again if it doesn't bother the others? @ncfrontiersman: No. I was just saying I liked how you talked about Windows being like the baby operating system, right? Can't hear me? Kozha: Dang it. @ncfrontiersman: Can anybody else hear me? Gav: Yeah, you're there, brother. @ncfrontiersman: Okay. All right. Well, we'll hear from you next time, Kozha. @ncfrontiersman: It's nice to hear from you. I'm glad you're joining us. @ncfrontiersman: I think. Kozha: Yeah. Now I can hear you again. Thank you, Wes. @ncfrontiersman: All I was saying was I liked your analogy about Windows and being like holding your hand like training wheels for a baby. Yeah. And then I was just saying that Omarchy kind of does that too, but also when you're ready, you can go as deep as you want, and it's not going to stand in your way, so. Kozha: Exactly. Exactly. You set it up one time, and even the setup, it doesn't feel like a burden. Kozha: It feels like a pleasure because I know I just type in a short phrase. I even dictate it if I don't feel like typing. Kozha: I dictate a short phrase, give it to my agent, and my agent does the rest. And yeah, it is. Kozha: It truly is. @ncfrontiersman: Well, it's great to hear from you. We have one more slot, and I think it's Tyler that asked to speak. But thanks, Kozha, and we'll talk to you next time. @ncfrontiersman: And Tyler, you're up, and then we're going to close out. @ncfrontiersman: Let's see. Tyler, you there? @ncfrontiersman: If you are, you got to unmute, I think. @ncfrontiersman: Okay. Well, maybe we'll get Tyler next time. @ncfrontiersman: Fred, any oh, nope. There he is. @ncfrontiersman: Okay. Tyler, you're up. @tylermayberry: Yeah. I just wanted to introduce myself. I missed the first couple of ones, so I just want to say hi. @tylermayberry: I'll be around. Name's Tyler. @tylermayberry: Glad to be a part of this. @ncfrontiersman: Tyler, you are completely out of control with all the software that you're shipping. @tylermayberry: I try. @ncfrontiersman: No, you don't try. There is no trying. You're doing it. @ncfrontiersman: It's amazing. @tylermayberry: Appreciate it. @ncfrontiersman: Yeah, brother. What's one thing you've built you want to share, Tyler? @tylermayberry: Right now, I am making I named it Ibara, and it's basically something where you can connect all of your PCs and hand them over to your agents and control them from your main Omarchy machine and connect to all the other Omarchy machines with one simple flow. If it's connected to Tailscale, you just install a plugin, press a button, and then you can hand it off to any agent or control it from any machine. @ncfrontiersman: And can you desktop control it too, or use it like a? @tylermayberry: Yeah. You can desktop control it, hand it off to your agent. It basically works just like GraphBot, but it's for all Omarchy machines, your own hardware. @ncfrontiersman: Oh, I love it. Love it. Well, share it in the chat, and I'm sure we'll all go check it out. @tylermayberry: I'm trying to get it released tomorrow, so. @ncfrontiersman: Okay. Yeah. All good. @ncfrontiersman: All good. Well, everybody, well, thank you, Tyler. @ncfrontiersman: And then everybody, thank you for joining. I always enjoy these conversations. @ncfrontiersman: Try to find some time before the week starts. Just sit down, have a quiet moment, plan your week out. @ncfrontiersman: It'll go well. Don't be in a hurry. @ncfrontiersman: Maybe it's the southern nature in me. Just go slow, and you're not going to miss out on anything, right? @ncfrontiersman: And then try to have fun. Fred, anything you want to say? @NixFred: Yeah, man. I want to thank a couple of our speakers today. Of course, Lee did an amazing job. @NixFred: A lot of folks spoke up. I'd like to really thank Porsche. @NixFred: She added a lot to the conversation today. That was pretty amazing. @NixFred: Of course, Tech Luddite, always there. @NixFred: Omarchy is an operating system, so what? The community is what makes this thing important. @NixFred: So get out there this week. Reach out to somebody. @NixFred: Help somebody. Be that person that changes their thoughts. @NixFred: Be that person that lifts them up. It doesn't cost you anything to do it. @NixFred: Help an old lady across the street, and when you get her over there, put Omarchy on her laptop. Make sure you follow everybody in here. @NixFred: We've got a band together as a community. Bring a friend next week to this space. @NixFred: Speak up. Wes and I just happen to be the host, but you're the star. @NixFred: We really appreciate you being here. Back over to you, Wes. @ncfrontiersman: Yeah. Yeah. Everything you said, agree with. @ncfrontiersman: All right, y'all. We'll see you next week. @ncfrontiersman: Same time, same channel, right, like Batman used to say. All right. @ncfrontiersman: See you later. @NixFred: Later, guys. Everybody out there, appreciate you. Go have a great week. @NixFred: I just said appreciate you. Want to hear the lines.