Urbit Newsletter - October 2026
Software, Moats, and Network Protocols
From the Executive Director
In the past month, it seems like software generation and model release cadence aren't the only things to be accelerating. So too is the rate at which investors--and anyone else who thinks about such things--ask, 'What is the remaining moat?'
Naval Ravikant is postulating that "Models are the last moat in software". David Heinimeier Hanson is having AI agents reimplement his different software products in multiple languages to see which is most performant. And hackers the world over are going gangbusters decompiling everything from "Halo: Combat Evolved" (and then getting it to run in the browser using WASM, or on the Playstation) and many other games, to shipping FOSS 'clean room, from scratch re-implementations' of the full Adobe Suite.
So really then, what is the moat? As agents do more and more, create custom software, and tear down the walls of previously closed systems, Urbit's long-standing thesis appears ever more true: Humanity wants networked computers, and legacy computing was just not originally designed with networking and distributed computing in mind.
And, ironically enough, in the age of agents, networked computing might be the only remaining moat. If anyone can replicate any software, or implement any feature, what does it mean for the software gatekeeping strategies of the last 30 years?
If your todo list app can look exactly the way you want it to, showing up in your colorway, running cross-platform across all your devices, and you can change it on the fly, the true moat becomes who you are doing things with and for. As we like to say on the network:
"That's Urbit."
To that end, as Urbit userspace continues to develop, its nature as a distributed protocol runner is starting to spread it's wings. Multiple clients for Tlon's `%groups` protocols arise to take advantage of a permissionless and peer-to-peer messaging tool in which the data belongs to you. Groundwire's %grubbery application model begins to host experiments in returning to threaded 'mail' conversational models with a better foundation for dealing with any future spam problems... And as you'll see in our upcoming October blog content, it is becoming accessible to anyone who dares to dream to just build fun and funny things with their friends.
The next few months will see further improvements in the runtime and performance of Urbit, but in a world where all things software are losing their moats, we expect those who see where the trendline is headed to increasingly flock to Urbit as the place to build multiplayer, distributed, and networked protocols.
See you on the network,~sicdev-pilnup
Contributor Spotlight: ~migrev-dolseg
A conversation on personal computing, Kelvin 0, %hawk, reactive interfaces, and LLM-native software.
~migrev-dolseg came in wanting Emacs on Urbit and ended up with %hawk: reactive UIs written in Hoon, fed by any data on the ship. The interview traces that through Kelvin 0 and why a small typed system is a better LLM harness than a pile of tokens.
Directed Messaging
Directed Messaging brings content-centric networking to Urbit, making large peer-to-peer data transfers dramatically faster.
Shipped with 408k, Directed Messaging asks the network for named data instead of a particular ship. Urbit already had the two hard parts, immutable references and identity, so peers can cache and serve the same bytes. The performance improvement, demoed at Lake Summit, looks like a 134 MB remote scry that took 26 minutes on the old path finishing in 2.6 seconds, a ~600× speedup.
This Month in Urbit: September 2026
September 2026 brings quick comet booting, Orraah, Talon calls, Grubbery mail and calendar apps, %harness, an Urbit-native browser, Lattice, and %lift.
New ways onto a ship landed this month: a one-command Hawk comet, and Orraah, a desktop runner for Linux, Mac, and Windows. Talon stretches groups into party-line calls, Grubbery grows threaded mail and a shareable calendar, agents get a harness and a headless browser inside the ship, and Lattice keeps a private knowledge store for you and your agents.
More September Articles
How we run our urbits
With this month's guest, ~disden-talhes
"Three fake planets, two comets, one moon, one real planet and a star thats down all on one mac mini. Anything less is a mental illness"
Send ~sarlev a picture of your urbit setup to be featured in a future monthly newsletter.
Changelog
One place for all your favorite changelogs, and highlights on software updates from across the network.
Urbit OS
Core devs continue to work on urbit/urbit and urbit/vere: Releases
- No new releases on the urbit/urbit releases page this month. The latest is still 408k-2 from August.
Tlon Corp.
Tlon continues to ship frequent updates to their Urbit apps and related mobile clients: Tlon changelog
- Native v9.5.4 Tlonbot-first navigation, Groups renamed Workspaces, Contacts replaced by Settings, plus hosting re-auth and bug fixes
- Native v9.5.2 Fix a crash when pressing certain buttons
- Native v9.5.1 Guided Tlonbot onboarding, refreshed native look, OpenRouter zero-data-retention toggle, and reconnect fixes