The Urbit Newsletter, April 2026
The world is experiencing a bespoke software explosion. From homeschool moms making educational apps for their children and Shakespeare scholars building collaborative annotation software 'for the studious reader', to blue collar guys making software tools that work exactly the way they want, the world of software is becoming ever more accessible. Of course, with this proliferation of traditional software, so too do we get continued growth of the ball of mud, and more people than ever running into the pain points of the legacy tech stack. As people discover Tailscale, Hetzner, and GitHub, so too will they discover technical debt and provider dependency.
Chief among the risks newcomers will encounter as they search for a way to build the software they've always wanted: supply chain attacks. Axios, LiteLLM, and countless others have been compromised in the past few weeks, with the impact of these attacks yet to be truly understood.
Does this mean that it is already time for Urbit to replace global computing? Not quite. But it highlights two things: demand for ways to make bespoke software for yourself, your family, your friends; and a need for a reduced surface area--reduced complexity--where bad actors can work their way in. Why import a dependency for sign-in when Urbit comes with an identity layer? Why deal with complex port forwarding rules on your router when your urbit handles routing for you automatically--even behind NAT?
Now, what kind of software people want to build? That's up to them. But here in 2026 we aim to make Urbit's userspace better able to satisfy the structural needs of developers, users, and the growing class of 'inbetweeners'. The mission is simple:
Make userspace security real
Make Gall amenable to alternate agent models/APIs
Make Gall amenable to keeping agents running across kelvin updates And release it all before the end of the year.
A big shout out to ~palfun-foslup, ~mopfel-winrux, ~midden-fabler, and ~lonhep-tamfeb as they work to make one last breaking change to userspace, so we can carry on in a future where "WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE".