Open Public was a cool idea. A commons where people can donate agentic compute to their favorite open source projects. But you know what? I really didnā€™t like building it.

An essential ingredient in any upstart is for you to really like what youā€™re doing. There was an initial set of technical challenges which were very interesting to me. I learned a ton about how to serve models at a low level from the protocol.

Thereā€™s also the joy of building an interface from scratch, which is very fun, especially when using something as fast as Elixir and Phoenix served through fly.io.

But after building it all, writing some content, talking to some people, getting some users, and going through the whole growth motion, my interest cratered. At this stage in my life, I donā€™t want to build a product, I want to build useful things that are inherently and obviously useful.

If I have to explain why something is valuable or market myself in order to convince people, then maybe Iā€™m better off doing something else. Or maybe I just simply missed a mark and Iā€™m trying to solve something that isnā€™t as important as I think it is. Thatā€™s totally fair. Either way, you gotta enjoy the journey.

If Iā€™m looking for a business, thereā€™s better businesses to start.

If Iā€™m looking for a creative outlet, thereā€™s many more ways to play. I love writing. Check out his blog, for instance. I write about all kinds of weird stuff! Even if no one reads it, I enjoy the journey.

But thatā€™s it. That project shut down. So if you wound up at this blog while looking for some compute or some project somewhere, you wonā€™t find it.

Thanks for giving me a chance and checking it out, anyways.