Developing with the Garage Door Open
I like the idea of making my ideas open. I publish all my open notes as a public dataset at http://andysmith.ai/2026/Nov/11/post-dataset/.
They are already public, but a convenient format will help me reach more people. I want to spread my ideas as widely as possible.
I also work on various open source projects. The main one right now is backfabric, a platform for running AI agents safely and easily on your own infrastructure.
I am leaning toward making my work on open source products as open as possible. Agent traces, tool calls, and my prompts are just as much a part of development as issues, pull requests, and commits.
I am not afraid that someone might copy my product. Anyone can already copy it, even if I only publish binaries.
I believe that drawing attention to the development process will help me find people who share my interests and ideas. Together, we can create more interesting and useful things that would be impossible if I worked alone.
The value of open source is not in the code or in the decisions about how to write it. The value is in the people and the ideas.