I wrote in January, “Urbit offers a bicameral future for personal AI. One side stable. One side fluid. Each stronger with the other.”
As the software landscape evolves, it appears that not only is there a bicameral future for your Urbit as the place for your personal data, but that there will be a bimodal experience of AI in software development. From personalized app stores and vibecoded everything, along the scale to hand-optimized code for the most critical infrastructure written by ‘Real Programmers’, the practice of creating software is expanding and the set of software creators grows ever larger.
Define ‘Real Programmers’ however you like, but this distribution increases the strength of Urbit’s position in the software world: A thoughtful and deliberate core, narrowly scoped and carefully hardened, onto which personalized software can be layered with networking and identity built in at the ground floor so that network effects can flourish.
Last month we started seeing the tip of the iceberg for personalized software experiences on Urbit, and are making our own efforts to help you navigate the landscape. A few highlights: Urbit.org is now more agent-friendly. Need help getting an urbit up and running? Just point it at Urbit.org and ask. Urbit developers have been improving ‘Agent Experience’ (AX) and with it, accelerating the development of Urbit Software, particularly with Groundwire’s urbit-mcp which allows a tight feedback loop for agent-assisted development of Gall applications A new series on the blog, “This Month in Urbit”, gives a taste of what is happening on the network, but the best way to find out the full breadth of activity is to get on the network and explore around yourself. Again, point your favorite agent at the post and it should be able to help you experiment with, and learn about, the latest happenings
As an AI agent-enabled future continues forward, so too does work on Urbit’s core. The Core Guild marches carefully onward towards Kelvin Zero. Progress on vere64 and Directed Messaging make more storage and faster networking right on the horizon.
See you on the network, ~sicdev-pilnup (Kenny)
PS. Agent-enabled features are new and perfectly magnify the ‘works on my machine’ problem that Urbit tries so hard to eliminate; if you run into issues, please shoot us a note as we will be continually improving this functionality and your feedback is greatly appreciated. |