# Let's Open Source the World — Brandon Thomas — session 2026-11-12T18:10:00.000Z → 2026-11-12T18:30:00.000Z _82 transcript lines · 40 slides_ ## Transcript And I've also been, I'm based in Atlanta, it's a big film film state. I've been very big in the art. So out of college, made lots of films, built laser projectors that play video games on the side of skyscrapers, that kind of thing. And those are the sort of, customers that our startups or the startups that I built have have catered to. Creatives, artists, filmmakers, and so forth. I wanna transport everybody back in time, back to the very beginnings of the web and the internet. The nineties, the, the the early two thousands. So, first, millennials, we're gonna Feel old. And for, everybody that's that's younger, this is... Just let me kinda set the stage for what the Internet was like. We had a bunch of chat applications that were completely open. So IRC is like Discord, but you could spin up your own servers that you actually own. You can use whatever programs to automate them and interrogate them without rules. All of the commercial, messaging apps were basically... They didn't care if you use third party tools to connect to them. Every website had data They had APIs. You could literally build really cool mashups with Reddit and Flickr and Twitter. And these were, like, trending on Slashdot before Hacker News was a thing. And then, you know, and and the more modern times, these kind of trickled down to a much slower pace because the APIs got got removed. There's a bunch of file sharing. So not not just file sharing. You can actually buy m p threes and feel a sense of ownership and and everything that you were doing on the web. And now, it's more Licensing. There was so much open creativity because largely the people on the internet were technical. They were early adopters. So, Flash, kids were making all kinds of animations. There were diffuse communities with PHP, PHP DB and Envision and just just a ton of creativity that was happening at the time. Wikipedia got started sort of in this ethos, and we don't really see this kind of stuff anymore in the current era and incarnation of tech. Websites were highly customizable. Like Myspace at the time, you could actually change the HTML and CSS and make it look however you want. So this was a totally different alien time compared to what we have today. When web two point o happened, broadband, smartphones, it brought everybody into the fold. So the technical people got sort of pushed to the sidelines. And it's not a bad thing. Like, we needed our, you know, our parents and our grandparents to be able to use these products. But we sort of... We rounded The edges on things. We took away all the technical pieces. We made everything easy for people to adapt because they couldn't contribute from a technical footing. They didn't wanna unpackage things. They didn't know what APIs were. And so the platforms and the the the proto... Like, protocols got replaced by platforms and, they sort of grabbed as many users as they could and sort of the diffuse experimental early web started to disappear. The APIs got taken away from us and then we started seeing distribution. Being gate kept by the big providers. Like, we never once had a phone ecosystem where we could freely distribute to, like like we could on the desktop. Things started to cost more and more as as startups began to, like, win market share. They realized that they had pricing power and, suddenly your Netflix actually became cable once you started subscribing to all the streaming services. And then, they started to get very extractive for companies that maybe Maybe hit the limits of their growth. They started coming up with crazy, crazy gotchas. So the one that got me is Adobe has this, you can subscribe to a monthly plan, and they don't tell you this. It's in, like, the very small print. If you cancel your monthly plan before the twelve months or eighteen months, they actually charge you up to, like, $200 to unsubscribe, which is really inconvenient if you're going to a film festival, like, once a year, making a short film, and then suddenly you've got an extra $200 bill for an application. You were just using over a weekend. And that's that's hit so many people, and it's really frustrating, that the web that was once really, really promising and open and free, has turned into this, extractive, owned, rented, rent seeking world. So, it it used to be a very special place in the nineties and the two thousands, and more and more has been extracted. This is a term It's commonly used, and should have occasion. I think that aptly describes everything that happened. Our company started with the ethos of let's build everything open source. Like, the applications that we built in the AI space were, 100% open, not only the desktop apps, but the actual infrastructure as well. So, ArtCraft originally started as sort of like a professionally minded Higgs field. So all of the the filmmakers that I know and that I've I've I've grown up with, we were making a product For them to use rather than a UGC centered approach, like like Higgs Field or or, OpenArt or or so forth have. And that enabled us to give them a desktop tool that lived on their machine where all of the files that they were generating lived right next to their editor. And one of the things that we observed, and my advisors thought I was absolutely crazy that artists, you know, they don't know what open source is. They don't they don't need it. They don't talk about it. You know, GIMP isn't really used by artists. We actually observed artists vibe. Coding, their own workflows on top of the software that we gave them. And that is something that, like, was brand new to all of us. Like, there were micro drama studios that were doing order fulfillment for some of the top, micro drama startups. They would do 30 to $50 of fulfillment every single month, and they had big teams. And no product out there fits their needs. Like, nobody's gonna go and workshop and build that specifically for the type of delivery that they need. Yet, they in house have people that know Claude code, and they can take the APIs and they can generate an interface that's like that. So, we started experimenting with completely open source, giving it to our customers, and they really responded to that. And then we thought, what if we could turn back time on everything? Like, all of these things that they're consuming and building would be much more friendly and and and give them way more capacity to create if all of the infrastructure was open source, if all of the application shapes that they wanted to leverage were open source. Like, they use Premier. They use Adobe. Like, what could... What what could we do to give them something that they could actually take away all of the surface area that they don't use and constrain the apps to their specific workflow? What would it look like if they could do that, you know, five or 10 times for each different artist on their team that's doing a particular part of that workflow? And so we wanted to kind of undo what had happened during web two point o when everything became owned and and consolidated and and, gate kept and just give People back their applications, and AI really is the means for us to do that. So we took a stab at the Adobe Creative Suite. We looked at Photoshop first. We basically prompted, you know, this is the basic shape of a photo editing app. You've you've consumed and trained on all of the tutorials about what Photoshop is. That's in your training data. We we laid out a large, large, prompt to say, let's let's build out the the application. Let's separate Create the UI UX from that. Let's make everything MCP and CLI compatible. Let's build out plans for every single tool, how all of those work. Let's talk about the data structures, the file format importers. We basically built these large prompts. And within twenty four hours, we were looking at a pretty good approximation of what Photoshop was. And it it kind of blew our minds away. It was functional. It was very familiar to us. It started 10 times faster than the original Photoshop. Now, we didn't Like, actually cover the entire surface area of Photoshop. There's a lot of work. We're still not at a 100% parity. But, we're measuring ourselves against what has... What needs to be done and we're getting closer and closer. We were at 50%. We've just passed 60%. And in the fullness of time, like Pareto principle, we could reach 99.99% parity. I'm gonna take a little bit of a, sort of a diatribe. Our team has talked about whether we take this further now or whether we just go for parity. And right now, we're just, we want to have, we want Fulfill the muscle, memory of all the artists that use Adobe. So, we are going for Adobe, like, their sort of interface and look and feel directly. In the fullness of time, we will build net new apps that have new interfaces that are more agentic. But we wanted to do that also as sort of like a proving function, that we have actually accomplished something real, completely agentically. So, we did Photoshop. We did, basically all of their apps. We did InDesign. We did Premiere. And, I I did not expect this to go viral. I was withholding posting it on Hacker News. It got out on Reddit and then, like, two days later, like, the like, New York Times was asking me for an interview and our Discord went from 3,000 people to, it's now got more people in our Discord than Jeff, Suno, Higgsfield. It... I I'm still struggling to bear with what has happened. This was a... It struck a nerve with people. They've felt sort of maligned by Adobe and other tech companies, and, what we've built has has really resonated with them. And it's Sort of built up sort of this mission to build more. So, all of the anti AI artists who have been pushing back against AI all of this time have, you know, they've sort of turned around. They're like, we actually love what you're doing. They've started using these apps. They've started giving us, like, feature requests and bug reports, and we're engaging them. And I think we're gonna be able to teach them this is what an MCP is. This is how you agentically create things. And maybe we'll start pulling away some some of these bloated interfaces and giving them things that are faster, more fluid. Let them do their work faster. So, we didn't stop with those apps. We've done all kinds of stuff. We've done CAD. We've done, Flash. We've done, a bunch of digital audio workstations. It's not just us. It's the community doing these things as well and there's really no limit in terms of what can be done. So, we've done the entire Microsoft... Well, the core apps within the Microsoft Office suites. There's been Google Docs. We have, companies and universities and all sorts of People approaching us wanting to use these things and we're we're basically trying to fulfill all of these different asks. They're being used on Linux where they've never been used before. PDF Craft is probably the best app. You should all go download it right now. You'll never have to use Acrobat again. This is like really fast, really smooth. It works on Linux, it works on NetBSD, it's it's brilliant. Like, this one's ready to go. So, go ahead and get this one. We did Figma. We've actually done the server component for this too. And you can basically have your team collaborate on on documents. It's got like the raft Paxos, like, multi user setup. So, we're starting to go into infrastructure too. And its entire infrastructure and data model, all of it is open source. We're not keeping any of it proprietary. There's a community that's working on solid craft that's led by engineers. They've actually got an open engineering kernel that manages all of this. It's it's really solid. Like the MCP, you can actually do three d printing projects really quickly with SolidCraft. We've had so, so much happen. We've got over 3,000, 300,000, GitHub stars. 4,000 different people have been contributing to this project, and it's picking up. It's actually become sort of a movement, if you will. And we're trying to adapt to how much influx of people trying to contribute to this. I'm going to pick up the pace because I've been kind of lagging on this. But, Getting about 1,700,000 downloads a day and this is accelerating. We've got a launcher app that puts us on the desktop and, like, you can you can basically manage everything here. It works on all operating systems. A quarter of our users are on Linux, which is really fascinating. Like, Linux has been historically really, really underserved, and now they have super high quality professional apps for creative and and, office work, which is it's really nice. So, we've... You know, we we love and All of the work that's been done there in the past, but people are really excited to use the apps that they didn't have access to. All of these things are MCP and CLI like first class. You can totally command these and you can localized into languages that were never officially supported by Adobe or Microsoft. Like, we were told that Arabic was not supported in InDesign. We've also supported these apps past their support life cycle. Like, Adobe Animate was being, end of life or it was being, like, put on life support. We've we've picked that up. We've had, basically, animation studios come to us saying, we use this for our jobs. Like, this is important. Please please support this. So, a lot of a lot of really fascinating things are happening where we're getting this into more places than they've ever been before. And it's it's definitely not me. Like, I I started this and now we've got a community of like 4,000 developers. This has taken on a life of its own. They are doing everything from CICD. It's It's incredible. This this is way bigger than just me. I really got to pick up the pace here. I made way too much content. So, there are over 300 apps being developed by the community. We've developed an app where non technical people can start contributing and use the basis of the apps that we've created, like the UI UX libraries. We're decomposing this into all of the the components and primitives so that you can reuse them. So, you'll have nice, three d libraries, nice two d libraries. It's all great. I'll get into the technical stuff. So, Rust was probably essential in this product's project success. We'd seen people do it in Electron before, but for high quality creative apps, you really need something that's native. There's just a lot of really, really good quality things about Rust. Google had papers about, like, the low defect rate. It starts really fast. It's it's the best language for this. Yeah. It supports all different platforms and operating systems. We've got this on netBSD. We've got this On tablets. It natively deploys to the web via WASM. So, it can get anywhere and everywhere. Do you need to know Rust to start using Rust today as an engineer? Definitely not. I've been using Rust since pre one o times, but everybody on the team, it's a mix of people that have never experienced the language before. Your agents will drive it just fine. You're not gonna have any trouble. It is a fantastic language. The one big thing you're gonna run into is compile times. Is it GUI yet? There's this famous website, Series of websites in the Rust Rust world. Does it support like modern features? Yes. You can build rich GUI apps in in Rust UI UX. We've run into a lot of gotchas like permissions, GitHub, scaling, CI. A lot of people talked about that. I'm gonna just speed through this because I'm kind of running out of time. CI is like falling over. We've been spinning up our own. We found a good place to get RAM on co located servers. We're moving to that. This is a good one. So, like, agentic develop versus human review. If you're doing back end work or things that require schema migrations, API Design, let your humans do that. But for like desktop apps and games and anything that's basically immutable, throw your agents at it and give them like full confidence. You don't need to be human in the loop fully. Like, the upstream, like directing where things go, just just let it run. Tell it to buildings. Somebody in our community is is building, they've got 40 machines rebuilding Unreal Engine in Rust. So, you you don't even have to mind these things. AutoCraft is a completely autonomous software factory that we're going to open source. It ingests issues. Triages them. It does agentic development. It post trains any valves on all of the decisions. This will be open source soon. Basically, we've got an entire app factory that's designed in code. You can express this. We'll open source this soon. I'm just going to have to hurry because I'm over time. Injustice issues. This is open source code rabbit, open source all the things. We're doing a lot here. And I thought I would save more time for the technical, but this is really good. And please, please look out for this. It will support all of your agenting develop. It supports all of the crafting and curating how you approach a project. It keeps your engineers on task. Again, fully open source. All of the decisions made by it are training data that we're going to use for evals and post training on the decision trees. Let's take back the entire internet. Let's rebuild everything. All software, all platforms. We can turn all of these things into proper For protocols. We can open source the entire world. Let's own our apps, our infra, our protocols, our models, all of it. We are hiring. So if anybody's interested and wants to work on 100% open source, none of our code is closed source. All of it is is in the open. You get time to work on your own projects, just reach out to me at hello@storyteller.ai, and thank you so much everybody. We're nearing the end of our morning keynotes, and it's time to bring back our MC to wrap things up. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome back Corey Quinn, chief cloud economist at The Duckbill Group. Now, that was a hard act to follow. I'm not sure how I'm supposed to do that, which means I don't have to. It's, that's the best thing about emceeing. Step Step one, be brief. It was an incredible morning. The thing that I love about these morning keynotes is that they tend to kick the energy up a bit. They help us start the day, and they give us with, work and ideas and conversations. And now we go back out there and we check the news and find out. The three quarters of what was just talked about is now irrelevant because there's been four new model releases and two new labs founded since then. But it carries us into the sessions. And we have some great ones coming up. We're going to meet back here afterwards. But while you're out there, talk to people. My my one of my favorite parts of conferences is the hallway track. Talk to people about what they're working on. Talk about what you're working on. Try not to overly pitch people too hard. Some people need reminders on that. Reconnect with old friends. Keep the energy going as well across the community as we get into the final day here. So if I don't see you out there because you're talking to other people with actually useful things to say, great. We'll see you back here for our closing keynote block kicks It kicks off at 04:20 this afternoon. Thank you. Go forth, have fun, and build something interesting. That completes this morning's run. Good job. Thank you. Appreciate it. ## Slides ### 00:00:13 # Brandon Thomas ## About Me - **15+ years** Software engineering - **8 years** Infrastructure at Square ### 00:00:39 # Brandon Thomas ## About Me - **15+ years** Software engineering - **8 years** Infrastructure at Square - **7 years** Startups - **2 ### 00:01:11 # The Internet was once open and awesome - 01 CHAT - 02 APIS & DATA - 03 FILE SHARING - 04 EASY TO ### 00:01:38 # The Internet was once open and awesome - 01 CHAT - 02 **APIS & DATA** - 03 FILE SHARING - 04 EASY ### 00:02:09 # The Internet was once open and awesome 1. CHAT 2. APIS & DATA 3. FILE SHARING 4. EASY TO AUTHOR 5. WEBSITES WERE CUSTOMIZABLE ## Let's Open Source the World Brandon Thomas / CEO [https://live.aiengineer.org/](https://live.aiengineer.org/) [Collage of old internet application windows and logos including Napster, µTorrent, GeoCities, GameFAQs, Macromedia Flash 4, phpBB, and Wikipedia, set against a background of a blue sky, green landscape, and city skyline.] ### 00:02:38 # The Internet was once open and awesome 1. CHAT 2. APIS & DATA 3. FILE SHARING 4. EASY TO AUTHOR 5. WE ### 00:03:07 # Then Web 2.0 happened - Delighting users! - *at scale ## 02 Apps got simple Clean, consistent apps anyone could pick up. --- ### 00:03:38 # Then Web 2.0 happened Delighting users! *at scale* ## 04 Distribution grew increasingly gatekept App stores decided what shipped, and when. ### Apple rejected ### 00:04:07 # Then Web 2.0 happened - Delighting users! - *at scale ## 06 Extraction began - Users and their data became the product. - Screenshot of ### 00:04:38 # Then Web 2.0 happened ## 06 Extraction began - Users and their data became the product. > Delighting users! > *at scale ### Screenshot ### 00:05:10 # ARTCRAFT We're a **100% open source** company serving creators. [Abstract wireframe geometric shapes in the background] ### 00:05:35 # ARTCRAFT We're a **100% open source** company serving creators. ## Let's Open Source the World Brandon Thomas / CEO A [Geometric wire ### 00:06:06 # ARTCRAFT We're a **100% open source** company serving creators. [Geometric wireframe shapes (polyhedra) floating in the background] ### 00:06:39 # ARTCRAFT We're a **100% open source** company serving creators. [Geometric wireframe shapes float around the text] ### 00:07:05 # ARTCRAFT We wanted to **turn back time.** [Abstract wireframe geometric shapes (polyhedra) scattered around the text] ### 00:07:39 # PhotoCraft ## Image Editing Layers, masks, and brushes, plus AI tools that run on your machine. - Raster - Layers - Local AI - Open source ### 00:08:11 # PhotoCraft ## IMAGE EDITING Layers, masks, and brushes, plus AI tools that run on your machine. - Raster - Layers - Local AI - Open source [ ### 00:08:39 ### IMAGE EDITING # PhotoCraft Layers, masks, and brushes, plus AI tools that run on your machine. - Raster - Layers - Local AI - Open source ## ### 00:09:11 # IMAGE EDITING ## PhotoCraft Layers, masks, and brushes, plus AI tools that run on your machine. - Raster - Layers - Local AI - Open ### 00:09:39 # FilmCraft ## VIDEO EDITING A timeline editor for everything from quick cuts to full features. - Timeline - Color - Export - Open source [Multiple overlapping screenshots of the ### 00:10:06 # Anti-AI folks **love this** > I don't care if AI wins > I just need Adobe to lose [Meme featuring Domhnall Gleeson as General Hux looking distressed, with captions "I don't care if AI wins" and "I just need Adobe to lose"] ### 00:10:42 # It didn't stop there. Audio, CAD, layout, motion, and photo, all built on the same open core. ### PRO TOOLS - 5 APPS - **SoundCraft**: Audio workstation - **CADCraft**: CAD - **DesignCraft**: Page layout - **EffectCraft**: Motion graphics - **LightCraft**: Photo library [Collage of five application screenshots: SoundCraft, CADCraft, DesignCraft, EffectCraft, and LightCraft, displaying their user interfaces] ### 00:11:05 # PDF TOOLS ## PDFCraft ### Screenshot of PrintCraft Showcase [Screenshot of the PrintCraft Showcase application interface] ### 00:11:39 # Let's Open Source the World ## INTERFACE DESIGN ### FigCraft Design together in real time, with live cursors and cursor chat. - Multiplayer - Prototypes - ### 00:12:04 ## The core apps have - **300K** GitHub stars - **100K** commits - **3M** Git clones - **4K** PR authors ### 00:12:39 # THE LAUNCHER - **1.7M** downloads a day - A quarter of our users are on Linux [Screenshot of an application launcher interface displaying various "Craft" ### 00:13:04 # All apps are **MCP** and **CLI** first class [Illustration of a robot with a screen showing a command prompt and a label "MCP"] ### 00:13:39 # Localized into languages the originals never were. ## العربية ## Tiếng Việt AND 50 MORE - ޱ - ພາສາລາວ - ქ ### 00:14:11 # Let's Open Source the World ## Brandon Thomas / CEO ### Screenshot of a web application titled "Craft" - SOFTWARE EXPLORATION & CREAT - COMMUNITIES ### 00:14:38 # Why Rust? Electron may no longer be necessary. | Feature | Rust | Electron | |---------------------|------|----------| | Native performance | ● | ◐ | | Small installers | ● | ○ | | Low memory footprint| ● | ○ | | Memory safety | ● | ◐ | | **Lower defect rate** | ● | ◐ | | Fast cold start | ● | ○ | [Comparison table showing Rust's advantages over Electron for various performance and safety features] ### 00:15:11 # Do you need to know Rust? Let's Open Source the World Brandon Thomas / CEO A [QR code] [Background illustration of wireframe geometric shapes] ### 00:15:33 # Gotchas - Permissioning - Someone's agent approved all the PRs - Antivirus false positives - Scaling process and CI - Large open source project issues [Comic strip showing a developer needing to unzip a file, then imagining a "ZIP BOMB" monster, and finally two characters panicking over "10 SECURITY LEVELS. 50 UNIT TESTS." to handle it.] ### 00:16:07 # How Agentic is this project? ## LET THE AGENTS RUN ### 100% agentic - Web Frontend - Mobile App UI/UX - Games and Game ### 00:16:35 # The App Factory ## AUTOCRAFT - THE PIPELINE ### Pipeline flow - Pipeline is On - **Waiting for people**: - **79** Waiting for ### 00:17:06 # 04 Post-train & evals Every merged change becomes training data. - Models are post-trained on accepted PRs - Evals run on every release - RL improves the factory ### Screenshot of Classifiers application Let's Open Source the World Brandon Thomas / CEO [https://polyhedra.ai/](https://polyhedra.ai/) [Screenshot of a web application showing classification metrics and tables, including "Items judged by both", "Agree on type label", "PRs", and "Issues", with detailed breakdowns by label and repository.] [QR code linking to polyhedra.ai] ### 00:17:39 # Come build it with us ## WE'RE HIRING 1. Systems engineers 2. Infrastructure engineers 3. Rust experience 4. You want to work on open source **100%** of our ### 00:18:06 # AI Engineer # Code Summit ### 00:18:38 # Corey Quinn Chief Cloud Economist, Duckbill [A dark background wall covered with white logos of various tech companies, many featuring 'AI Engineer Code Summit' branding.] ### 00:19:07 # Corey Quinn Chief Cloud Economist, Duckbill ## AI Engineer Code Summit Partners - FACTORY - Google DeepMind - Databricks - Devin - G2i - ### 00:19:40 # Corey Quinn Chief Cloud Economist, Duckbill