“People over profit.”

Few political slogans manage to sound so compassionate while demonstrating such a fundamental misunderstanding of economics.

It's a phrase designed to end an argument before one can begin. Who could possibly object to putting people first? Surely only someone who values money more than human life.

But the slogan depends on a false premise: that profit and human well-being are competing objectives.

In a free market, profit is earned by creating value for other people.

The businessman who wants to make money must offer something others consider worth buying. He must produce goods or services people value more than the money they're asked to exchange for them.

And he must do so while using fewer resources than the revenue he receives, or his business will eventually cease to exist.

That last part matters enormously.

Because producing something people want is only half the challenge.

You must also produce it economically enough to keep producing it.

Profit Is What Makes Production Sustainable

Imagine two businesses producing bread.

The first spends $3 producing a loaf that customers willingly purchase for $5.

The second spends $7 producing the same loaf, which customers also purchase for $5.

Both businesses are feeding people.

Both are satisfying a human need.

But only one is creating an economically sustainable supply of bread.

The first earns $2 in profit before accounting for any additional expenses not included in our example.

The second loses $2 on every loaf.

Which business is better positioned to continue feeding people tomorrow?

Which can afford to expand production, purchase better equipment, hire more workers, or open another bakery?

Which is more likely to survive an unexpected increase in costs?

The answer should be obvious.

Yet the political movement that claims to prioritize human needs routinely treats the pursuit of profit as morally suspicious.

Apparently, feeding people is virtuous until you figure out how to do it sustainably.

Then it becomes greed.

Profit Is Information

Profit serves a purpose far beyond enriching the person who earns it.

It communicates information.

When a business earns a profit in a competitive market, it provides evidence that customers value its output sufficiently to cover the resources required to produce it.

When a business consistently loses money, it indicates that something needs to change.

Perhaps customers don't value the product enough.

Perhaps production costs are too high.

Perhaps another producer has discovered a more efficient method.

Perhaps the resources being consumed could create greater value elsewhere.

Profit and loss help entrepreneurs discover the answers.

They provide a mechanism for coordinating production without requiring a politician or bureaucrat to decide what everyone should produce, how much they should produce, and where resources should go.

This mechanism is imperfect. Profits can also arise from government favoritism, subsidies, monopoly privileges, and other distortions.

But those are violations of free-market principles, not arguments against them.

Under genuine capitalism, businesses must persuade customers to part voluntarily with their money.

Under political favoritism, businesses can persuade politicians to part with someone else's.

That distinction matters considerably more than whether someone happens to be wealthy.

The Problem With Putting People Over Profit

Consider what the slogan actually implies.

If profit is subordinate to human needs, what happens when satisfying those needs becomes economically unsustainable?

Suppose a government orders a business to sell food below the cost of producing it.

Consumers initially celebrate.

Food becomes cheaper.

Politicians congratulate themselves.

Activists declare victory over corporate greed.

But the underlying costs haven't disappeared.

Farmers still need equipment.

Workers still need wages.

Transportation still requires fuel.

Buildings still require maintenance.

And the resources consumed in production still have alternative uses.

Someone must absorb the losses.

The business can absorb them temporarily, but not indefinitely.

Eventually, investment declines, production contracts, suppliers withdraw, or the business closes.

The government can attempt to prevent this by providing subsidies.

But subsidies merely transfer the burden to taxpayers. They don't eliminate the underlying economic cost.

Alternatively, the government can impose further controls, compel production, ration supplies, or nationalize the industry.

Now the original intervention has created problems that become the justification for additional interventions.

And the people supposedly being protected are left with fewer choices, less production, and greater dependence on political authority.

All because someone decided that economic reality should be subordinate to political intentions.

You cannot make production sustainable by declaring profitability immoral.

The Morality of Earning a Profit

There's also a moral question that advocates of “people over profit” rarely address.

Why should earning money by satisfying someone's needs be considered morally inferior to satisfying those needs without earning money?

Consider a farmer who grows enough food to feed thousands of people.

He invests his savings, purchases equipment, assumes financial risks, hires employees, and spends years developing a productive enterprise.

People voluntarily purchase his products because they value the food more than the money they exchange for it.

The farmer earns a profit.

Who has been wronged?

The customers received food they wanted.

The employees received compensation they agreed to accept.

The suppliers received payment for their products.

And the farmer earned a return for his productive efforts.

Every participant entered the exchange expecting to benefit.

Yet somehow, the farmer's desire to benefit from the arrangement is supposed to diminish its moral worth.

Why?

Why should the person responsible for organizing production be expected to regard his own well-being as less important than everyone else's?

Why should his success become a moral liability?

And why should someone who contributes nothing to the enterprise acquire the authority to dictate what constitutes an acceptable return?

The answer generally rests on an unearned assumption: that human need creates an entitlement to someone else's productive efforts.

But needing something doesn't establish ownership over the people capable of providing it.

Your needs do not make someone else's life, labor, or property yours to command.

Profit Doesn't Require Exploitation

Another misconception is that profit necessarily comes at someone else's expense.

This assumes wealth is a fixed quantity that can only be redistributed.

But wealth is produced.

A farmer transforms land, labor, equipment, and knowledge into food.

An engineer develops technology that makes workers more productive.

A manufacturer discovers how to produce better products using fewer resources.

An entrepreneur identifies an unmet demand and organizes the resources necessary to satisfy it.

These activities create value.

And when people voluntarily exchange the results, both parties can benefit.

The customer gains something valued more highly than the money surrendered.

The producer receives revenue that may exceed the costs of production.

Neither party needs to lose for the other to gain.

This is the fundamental economic and moral distinction between voluntary trade and coercive redistribution.

One requires creating something another person willingly pays for.

The other requires obtaining something from a person regardless of whether he consents.

And yet the people who condemn profit frequently regard the second arrangement as morally superior.

Apparently, earning money by providing something people want is selfish, while demanding money from people who earned it is compassionate.

That's a remarkable inversion of morality.

But What About People Who Cannot Pay?

This is where advocates of “people over profit” often retreat.

What about the poor?

What about people who cannot afford food, housing, or medical care?

These are legitimate concerns.

But they don't invalidate the economic function of profit.

A person's inability to afford something doesn't eliminate the resources required to produce it.

A hospital still needs doctors, equipment, medication, electricity, and buildings.

A house still requires land, materials, skilled labor, and maintenance.

Food still needs to be grown, processed, transported, and distributed.

Calling these things human rights doesn't magically produce them.

And eliminating profit doesn't eliminate their costs.

If society wants to help people who cannot afford essential goods and services, the first requirement is that those goods and services exist in sufficient abundance.

That requires production.

Production requires resources.

And sustainable production requires that those resources be used economically.

Profits and losses help make that possible.

Charity can then help people who cannot afford what they need.

Voluntary assistance is a genuine expression of compassion because someone chooses to provide value at his own expense.

It doesn't require treating producers as public property.

Nor does it require dismantling the economic incentives that make widespread prosperity possible.

Compassion cannot distribute what production has failed to create.

The Difference Between Intentions and Results

Socialism is routinely defended by appealing to its intentions.

It supposedly prioritizes human needs over private profit.

But intentions don't feed people.

Production does.

Intentions don't build homes.

Construction does.

Intentions don't manufacture medicine, develop technology, or transport goods.

Human ingenuity, productive effort, investment, and the intelligent allocation of scarce resources do.

And while production doesn't always require an individual seeking personal profit, it always requires confronting the economic reality that resources are limited and cannot be consumed indefinitely without being replenished.

A worker cooperative must remain economically viable.

A nonprofit must cover its costs through revenue, donations, or other funding.

Even a government enterprise must consume real resources that could have been used elsewhere.

Changing the ownership structure doesn't repeal economics.

Nor does replacing the pursuit of profit with political direction eliminate the need to determine whether resources are being used productively.

It merely changes who makes those decisions, what incentives guide them, and who bears the consequences when they're wrong.

Under capitalism, entrepreneurs generally bear the financial consequences of their mistakes, while consumers remain free to take their business elsewhere.

Under centralized socialism, political authorities can continue directing resources toward failed projects while compelling the population to finance them.

And when production fails to satisfy demand, the same authorities can blame the resulting shortages on greed, sabotage, or insufficient political control.

The system's failures become excuses for expanding the very powers that contributed to them.

People Benefit From Profit

The phrase “people over profit” survives because it exploits a moral confusion.

It treats profit as though it were something extracted from human well-being rather than something that, under voluntary exchange, can result from improving it.

Of course, profit alone doesn't establish that an action is moral.

Fraud, theft, political favoritism, and coercion can also be profitable.

That's precisely why capitalism requires objective laws protecting individual rights.

The moral legitimacy of profit depends on how it is earned.

But when profit is earned through voluntary production and exchange, it represents a reward for creating value that others willingly purchase.

It encourages entrepreneurs to discover unmet needs.

It attracts investment toward productive opportunities.

It rewards efficiency and innovation.

And it makes continued production economically sustainable.

The pursuit of profit has helped make goods that were once luxuries accessible to ordinary people.

It has encouraged businesses to compete for customers by improving quality, reducing costs, and developing entirely new products.

The people who benefit aren't limited to the entrepreneurs earning the profits.

They're the millions of consumers whose standard of living improves because someone discovered a profitable way to serve them.

Which brings us back to the slogan.

“People over profit.”

What an extraordinary thing to say while depending every day on an economic system in which the pursuit of profit motivates countless strangers to produce the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the technology you use, and the shelter you occupy.

The slogan asks us to choose between people and one of the principal incentives for producing the things people need.

It's rather like demanding human survival be prioritized over food production.

The pursuit of profit, properly understood, is one of the ways people serve one another through voluntary trade.

And the people who want to abolish that incentive should be expected to explain what will replace it, how resources will be allocated, how production will remain sustainable, and why their alternative deserves anyone's confidence.

Until then, “people over profit” is little more than a declaration of good intentions accompanied by an alarming indifference to the means required to achieve them.

Because the question isn't whether people matter more than money.

The question is whether you understand what makes their prosperity possible.

And if your answer involves destroying the incentives that encourage people to produce, invest, innovate, and trade, perhaps you should reconsider which side of that slogan actually serves human beings.

Libertarians rarely like the advance auction of stolen goods that are general elections. Politicians mindlessly throw around promises to spend money that isn't theirs, on projects they wont be accountable for (really), to give to people who didn't earn it, or to control people's property, or to tell them what to do, and send some people to prison for not doing what they say. It is a bidding war on borrowed money from future taxpayers by and large, and it is fundamentally banal.

The NZ 2026 election has been particularly woeful. However, there are choices

• Keep the National-led coalition government in power;

• Replace it with a left-wing variant led by Labour, but also with the Greens, Opportunity and maybe Te Pati Maori;

• Opt out of giving any of them your endorsement.

I'm tempted by Peter Cresswell's support of the last, but I think it is ill founded, because there really is a choice between a ragtag mob of people who sometimes do good, and a ragtag mob of people who rarely do good. The right to not vote is important though, Australians don't have it, because it is a much more rules based country than NZ. You don't need to vote, you can curse them all, noting your impact is miniscule although not zero. However, I think you should consider voting for a party at least (electorates are a different matter, which I will follow up on tomorrow).

There are nuances to these three choices of course, some think you can have the first with Opportunity, some think you can have the last without, but for a country with an electoral system now offering seven parties that are highly likely to be elected, it seems fairly binary. It’s not though, it’s a sliding scale as to the degree you want government to have power, control and your money to spend, what you want it to have power, control and to spend money on, and the philosophical underpinnings for doing that.  You can make choices for options 1 and 2 that are variants on what matters to you. You can be moderate with the two main parties, or be more aggressive in various directions. There is only one direction I want to go in, which is a bit less government.

What about ACT?

Despite commentary by some of the shallow of thinking, there is no libertarian option on the ballot, so I should first address that elephant in the commentary. ACT is not a libertarian party. It isn’t even the party of Roger Douglas’s Unfinished Business – which was a manifesto in itself.  ACT is neither radical nor bold, indeed where it lies today is perhaps where the National Party was in the late 1990s, with occasional flashes of inspiration on a handful of matters. 

A libertarian party would be calling for significant cuts in state spending, not simply taking it down to levels proportionate when John Key was in power. 

A libertarian party would be calling for decriminalising adult ingestion of any substances, as long as there is adult responsibility for the resulting behaviour.

A libertarian party would be calling for getting the state progressively out of the supply of most goods and services, fundamental reform of education and healthcare, and individualising national superannuation, ACC and social welfare.

ACT sometimes lights up on parts of these, from time to time, but it is mostly a party of the conscience of the National Party. It’s single greatest achievement is charter schools, even those these are somewhat hogtied by a National Party terrified of the teachers’ unions. Starting a more fundamental debate on the Treaty was useful, at the very least as a way of venting frustration and discussing what could not have been discussed for years – the role of the Treaty and what its application meant. On a side point, it is a disgrace, to the other parties, that ACT is the only party that doesn’t want to wage war on supermarkets.  However, it is also extremely disappointing that Paul Henry will be in Parliament.  Yes I've read his book, it didn't take long.

NZ First?

Beyond ACT, occasionally NZ First will emerge with something that is consistent with individual freedom, free market capitalism and supporting core defence/law and order roles of the state, but it is fundamentally a party of opportunism. NZ First is reverting to a mix of soft-nationalism, casual bigotry towards migrants and conservativism, even if it history in power has been largely to be happy with symbols and spending on baubles (railways seem to be one of the latest ones). It’s conservative-nationalism without the anti-semitism, white supremacy and militarism. While I admire NZ First’s rejection of critical theory, and baiting of the ethno-nationalists on the hard left, a party that calls variously for nationalisation, vast state projects and incoherent regulation on an ad hoc basis is not one I can support. I'm heartened though that it might hoover up lots of votes that might go to smaller loony parties.

 Though I will give Winston Peters credit for ending funding of the Hamas infested UNRWA.

National?

National this past term has been more impressive than under the Key-English era, not least because it actually repealed laws passed by Labour. That’s no small achievement, as National usually just continues what Labour did, with a handful of exceptions. Most notable was repealing Labour’s Natural and Built Environments Act and Spatial Planning Act, which would have continued the nationalisation of land, although the replacement is a long way from being what many of us hoped for.  Also notable is:

• Scrapping Three Waters which would have indirectly shared control of water infrastructure with Iwi.

• Scrapping the Maori Health Authority

• Scrapping the creeping ban on (legal) tobacco sales for adults

• Scrapping the virtue signalling ban new offshore oil and gas exploration

• Scrapping the grossly inefficient Lake Onslow Pumped Hydro boondoggle

• Scrapping the Auckland Light Rail project

• Scrapped the compulsory national Social Insurance programme

• Unwinding the centralisation of polytechs

• Scrapping legislation to impose industry-wide collective bargaining

• Scrapping the “ute tax” subsidy for new EV buyers

• Scrapping the Reserve Bank’s dual mandate

• Reintroducing applying the same tax deductibility on interest bills for residential property investment as with other investments

There is plenty of disappointment too. Reform of local government has been mixed, with semi-forced amalgamations, rather than stripping the power of general competence. The rates cap is a significant win, although it is much later than it should have been.

On education, the reinstatement of charter schools is a good step, as have been some reforms of the curriculum, but the fundamentals are still antagonistic to choice and diversity in education, and little has been done to strip out the significant leftwing/critical theory bias in curriculum, teacher training and recruitment. Nothing matters more than getting this right because education profoundly affects the futures of young people, as well as national culture, identity and philosophy. For many years it has been dominated by a philosophy and people whose views on this do not align with the government, let alone a free, open liberal democracy with capitalism, private property rights and individual responsibility.

That wont change while so much power is centralised in Wellington, and while a central focus of the system is preventing industrial action by teaching unions that openly back leftwing parties and oppose performance based pay, and opening up teaching beyond the heavily post-modernist oriented teacher training system.  National has shown little interest in tackling these issues. What a disaster the free school meals policy has been as a distraction, set up by Labour in its endless effort to give people something paid for by future generations. 

On healthcare, it is all tinkering. Beyond some arguments around centralised vs. devolved power, or having a specialist cancer hospital, almost all debates on healthcare are around how much money and where does it go. While the left debates bans and taxes on products that it disapproves of for being unhealthy (tobacco, alcohol, gambling, sugar, fat, salt), the “right” says little beyond enabling more private provision of healthcare. Nobody talks about how the current system, fundamentally, has little link between user demand and supply, nor how the rationing of public healthcare inevitably means people wait for services, and some are delayed, and they suffer and some die as a result. Talk of reform onto a partial insurance model, as seen in Australia, Singapore, Switzerland, France, Germany and others will inevitably see shrieks of unhinged hysteria about “Americanisation”, which nobody advocates. Politicians who don’t advocate more socialism in healthcare (i.e. free dentistry supplied by whom?) are fearful of even starting a debate about how healthcare is structured and funded. So, nothing new is coming there. Don’t expect anything about ACC either, that lumbering state monopoly isn’t being challenged by anyone.

On welfare, it is tinkering as well. Sure, eligibility is somewhat tighter, and there is talk about drug testing (which is somewhat performative), but there is little about stripping back the scale of the middle class welfare state that Helen Clark and Michael Cullen set up to trap the National Party, successfully. Indeed, Nicola Willis has thrown more money at it with her Family Boost package subsidising (heavily regulated) childcare. Nobody has answers about addressing structural welfare dependency, and indeed the Opportunity Party wants everyone on welfare, and the hard-left parties want much more.

On the size of the state and freedom more generally, besides a few surprises (abolition of the Broadcasting Standards Authority), there’s little sign of any progress. Nicola Willis wont cut the public sector to the level to 2017 levels (adjusted for today’s population) because apparently that would be “too tough”. However, she’s and Luxon are keen to consider breaking up the largest NZ franchisee owned supermarket chain, to show off a commitment to lowering grocery prices. It’s only slightly more sensible than Labour’s policy of structural separation, which is economic lunacy and unprecedented anywhere in the world.  Moreover, Luxon is also keen on following Australia’s unsuccessful ban on under 16yos accessing social media, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it led to compulsory ID for internet access because, well, the instincts towards individual freedom are difficult to see.

Finally, on the economy, the age of riding off the back of the reforms of the 1980s and 1990s is well and truly gone. Clark did that, as did Key, but the gains from those reforms have ebbed away as regulation has creeped in, and the role of the state has grown bit by bit. It has become more and more difficult to set up business, hire people, open bank accounts and trade, and the competitiveness of NZ compared to other economies has waned as a result. Again, four of the parties vying for Parliament are keen to make that significantly worse, of course always with the best of intentions. Genuine interest in reforms that improve productivity exist in some. Addressing housing supply, reforming the planning system, even allowing road pricing all make small and useful differences, but none are fundamental. David Seymour’s Ministry of Regulation has surprisingly, made some small differences, but there needs to be a much more direct commitment to making starting and sustaining businesses and hiring people easier.  The leftwing parties don’t believe in that.

Perhaps, by far, the most disappointing element of the Luxon Government is Luxon himself. He is one of the most uselessly uninspiring and awkward Prime Ministers in recent history. He lacks authenticity and seriousness. He is so unconvincing it is painful. He laughs awkwardly at questions or things he said, and nobody really knows what matters to him, beyond his family. To his credit he has largely let Ministers take charge of their portfolios, like CEOs do to sectoral managers, but he is not a CEO. He is expected to provide leadership, gravitas, philosophical and “national” authority as he represents NZ globally and presents a vision that is convincing, not always popular, but grounded in something, anything.

The fact that few opinion polls put National at 30% or above is a testament to his failure. It remains quite the paradox that on the one hand so many in the country think Luxon is a poor Prime Minister (but even more think Hipkins could be worse), but a majority of National’s caucus don’t think so (or merely dislike the alternatives). It’s obvious that, short of a remarkable turnaround in the next week, Luxon will not be Prime Minister at the 2029 election. Even if he can manage to retain power this time, he will have lost authority, especially if he has also lost Nicola Willis and Chris Bishop because the party vote has fled elsewhere out of sheer frustration and fear. 

Overall?

A great government? No. A good government? In snippets. A better one than Hipkins had? Yes, but what a low bar that was.

Could it be better? Of course. It could cut spending, it could liberalise education from the bureaucracy, the unions and the stultifying ideology that cauterises real critical thinking. It could embrace private property rights as so many of them want to. It could focus relentlessly on productivity, and on an outward looking mindset, and a belief that individual freedom and responsibility are to be cherished and encouraged, and for people to be judged not on their background, but on their deeds.  It could believe in retaining internet anonymity and freedom, and promote parental and business responsibility in changing the online culture of bullying and harassment.

A party vote for ACT might inch that a little closer. I doubt one for NZ First will. I’m unsure one for National really would.

What is clear is that the other four parties turn away from this. Their main driver is how to take more money from people and businesses, and to funnel it through Wellington to pay for more public sector employees or more welfare, and more spending. They want to control and regulate more, they want to more judge people based on their background, than on their deeds. They want more state. They talk of freeing people from burdens, but they want to take charge, be our parents, and to divide people into those who must be taken from, and those who should receive.  Moreover, they have become more radical, more militant, more strident. Some want wealth taxes – taxes on what you own, after paying taxes on the income in the first instance, all want to sacrifice your standard of living to reduce emissions for zero measurable gain, all default to more spending, more regulation and more control.

So yes, vote for one of the three coalition parties. I’ll be party voting ACT, with many reservations, but it’s not like 2008, when the choice between Clark and Key was largely one of style, not substance.  This government has many weaknesses, the biggest one is at the head of it, but it’s much less dangerous than the side led by activists, unionists, race supremacists and haters of capitalism, liberal democracy and private property. 

VATICAN CITY — Blue smoke rose from the roof of the Sistine Chapel on Friday, signaling that Pope Leo XIV had voted for a third term for Illinois Governor JB Pritzker.

A self-driving computer is a computer which writes all its own apps. Every app is an agent which develops itself.

Sure you can download other peoples’ code. You can drive your own self-driving car. You don’t have to, though.

Like with agents now, if you know what you want your computer to do, just tell it what to do. But unlike with agents now, a self-driving computer doesn’t just do things. It makes tools that do things, then uses these tools. As you use your private computer, it becomes your universal tool.

If you ask for a task in the chat, the computer will do it. It may have to build a new tool. Next time, you can ask again. Or you can use the UI. You’re a customer base of one. Your computer has every feature you want and none you don’t. For the first time ever, it fits you.

User story

I just did my taxes with Muse. (Yes, I know, I’m retarded.) Muse is great. Muse is a computer that can do anything, so long as it can be done with Web services, a Jupyter notebook, and an autistic, retarded generalist genius. I was left with—a 1040 and a Jupyter notebook. Of course I can’t rerun my Muse chat, like a Jupyter notebook. But if I have to change anything, Muse will probably get it right. Almost certainly.

A chat is not the best interface for everything. If for anything! What we love about our bots is that they can do anything. It isn’t how we use them (unless we’re driving).

Here’s the difference. With an actual self-driving computer, I would sit down with the same pile of dog-spoiled mail. I would have roughly the same conversation. I would be left with—a 1040, and TurboTax For Me.

Again: on a self-driving computer, an agent is an app. An app is an agent. You can use it just like Muse. You can talk to an app and tell it what to do. You can talk to an app and tell it what to be. When it can’t do X without being Y, the agent writes code. As it talks to you, the app evolves to fit your needs.

(Of course connecting to external Web services is essential, but it is transitional. Your data should be on your own computer—virtual or physical. A connector is just an app that pretends to own your data, but doesn’t.)

“TurboTax For Me” is also a tax expert you can talk to. Thomas. Thomas is also a 10^6x coder, who codes as fast as he does data entry. He puts together the app as he looks at your ridiculous pile of papers.

Next year you’ll go back to Thomas and tell him how your financial life has changed. He’ll update the code to reflect that, plus any legal changes.

Talking to Thomas is just like talking to Muse. But Thomas is building out an application, not writing one-off sandbox scripts. You can change a digit in a form and rerun the application. Unlike a Jupyter notebook, you can’t rerun Muse. You have no way to look at what it’s doing. You could see the shell commands?

Muse is probabilistic. Taxes, however, are deterministic. If you probabilistically write deterministic code, it will probably work. Prove, audit, and/or test that it works. Then run it forever.

Again, every self-driving app is an agent which develops itself. You are the only customer for this product. Thomas is your product manager. Sometimes he learns new product requirements. Thomas is on it. Your tax app isn’t just developed. It’s maintained. It has versions.

How do you use a self-driving computer? Just like Muse. Just tell it what to do. But instead of writing one-off sandbox scripts, it will build actual software. For you. You can tell it what to do, or use the UI, or both.

Why is Muse better than TurboTax? Because most of the mental stress of TurboTax is wading through the 90% of questions that don’t apply to me. Or do they? No, I do not have any agricultural deductions. Or… the landscaping? Alas, I cannot ask my TurboTax. Maybe it’ll get better at that. But if I had TurboTax, but built just for me—hell would freeze twice before I switched from that, back to the Muse UI.

In a self-driving computer, anything the computer does, it does by commanding its own apps. One-offs are considered harmful. If an app, a connector, or a feature is needed, it is added. In a self-driving app, any discrete action the app can take has a UI that can take that action.

Of course, one task can involve a complex flow of actions. This creates a great way to observe agentic computation: have the AI animate the UI as it accomplishes the task. You are treating the agent as a coworker and looking over its shoulder.

Thomas is at the controls. Thomas is just using the app he just made for you. Maybe he’s also livestreaming his actions in voice, like Twitch. Watching him use the tool is actually a great, passive way to learn to use it yourself. You supervise your self-driving computer, just like in a Tesla. Visualization—the ability to literally watch your agent doing its job—is a game changer. It feels like real ownership, because it is.

Take a moment to appreciate how much better this experience will be than doing your taxes in a chat. Which is, by the way, great.

Unix: the moat

The universal Silicon Valley question is the “moat.” This is not an abstruse product vision. Quite the contrary. It’s an obvious product vision.

When a vision is obvious and the product doesn’t exist, there are two possibilities. First: the vision is technically impossible. Second: the vision is commercially retarded. These issues are orthogonal and by no means mutually exclusive.

Now let’s answer the important question: why isn’t the above experience a thing yet? Why is it so hard? Is it, in fact, impossible?

I think that—with present technology—it’s quite difficult, if not impossible. Here’s why.

There are two kinds of personal agents today: bots (Muse, Grok Bot, OpenAI Dots, etc) and claws (OpenClaw, Hermes Agent). Bots are sane and separate the harness and sandbox. Claws are insane and combine them.

Bots can’t evolve into self-driving computers for two reasons, one deep and one silly.

The silly reason is that the bots are store apps. On Apple Store or Google Play, an app can’t be a meta-app. Muse can show you a chat, but not a UI. It actually can’t let you run your own apps, with their own UIs, on your own server.

The deep reason is that an app belongs with its data—internal variables and data structures, not external files and databases—and these constructs don’t belong in either the bot’s harness, or the bot’s sandbox.

A sandbox is a sandbox—an arena of transient chaos, where nothing is sacred and everything is deleted. If you put your sacred personal data in the sandbox, either you are a fool, or it is no longer a sandbox. But the harness is the opposite: a meticulously wired brain. The human body has a blood-brain barrier for a reason. Once vibecoded apps start scribbling on your context compiler, hell’s door is open.

Claws, which have quickly occupied the nerd side of the nerd/normie divide, do not have the deep limitation. A claw can do anything. Of course it can rewrite itself. Of course it can build its own apps.

The fundamental problem of the self-driving Unix claw is that it has to unify personal agents with AI development. While there are certainly limited solutions to this problem—more or less, toys—AI development today means Unix server development.

Today, an AI developer still has to be a developer. You can vibecode. But in practice, you still need to know what you’re doing. It’s really not for normies. Many are trying to solve this problem. They haven’t solved it yet. It’s not clear that they can—and even then, at what cost?

If you don’t know what you’re doing, vibecoding for Unix quickly generates vibe spaghetti. This spaghetti is liberally studded with security holes, rogue commands, and footguns of every shape and description. It is soon too complex for even super-duper intelligence to manage.

Unix is a zoo. It was written for minicomputers the size of a refrigerator in the 1970s. It has done just about everything since. It is full of legacy impedance mismatches (object-relational mapping!) and other clunky stuff that is a constant generator of risk and complexity.

The idea of putting your own vibecoded apps, critical data, and harness logic into one Unix compartment is… fundamentally deranged. Then again, so is landing a rocket on its tail. At some point, it can probably be done. But do we have to do it this way?

There are three ways to make AI more powerful. A: make the model smarter. B: make the context (ie, the harness) smarter. C: make the problem easier. While we continue to make progress on A and B, the most alpha is always in C.

How do we make the problem easier? Well: let’s look from the other side of the question. How *should* we be solving the problem?

When we zoom in closer, the Unix programming environment—even if we could solve all its legacy problems with security, safety, etc—is a bad fit for the specific problem of a self-driving computer.

The state model is completely wrong. Because of the hardware architecture of a DEC VAX in 1976, Unix has two states: disk and memory. It solves everything by rebooting. A virtual computer in 2026 does not need two levels of state.

A self-driving computer does need to update your app’s code, while preserving its data—even if its data structures change. Unix has many languages and frameworks. Almost none support hotpatching—which only applies to memory, anyway. On disk, it’s schema evolution. Also advanced. Also did you fsync() that?

In the past there was no choice. We had to use standard tools. Before AI, success for a new language or OS meant cultivating an ecosystem of programmers. A brutal network-effect problem, taking years or decades, totally unfundable, only for crazy people—rejects, schizos and maniacs. But it’s 2026 and who cares?

The future

If we can build a general-purpose platform on which AI can build anything easily—much more easily, securely, reliably than on Unix—we don’t need programmers. We don’t even need applications. You can start with a naked computer. Just tell it what you want to do.

Yes, of course, most people will still download most apps. They will still change them. Or rather, the apps will change themselves. Steve Ballmer once observed that his customers always complained that they needed only 5% of the features of Word. But it was always a different 5%. With a self-driving computer, it is always the right 5%.

So how do we build a self-driving computer? Of course, we have to build it on Unix. But you can’t see Unix through it, and one day Unix will just go away. (I will miss it. I got my first Unix box, the great AT&T 3B1, in 1986.)

First: there is no “code.” There can’t be procedural “code,” which both does stuff and returns a value. Our new OS is a functional OS. There are pure functions. There are data structures. There is no “code.”

The absolute worst things a pure function can do: (a) return the wrong value; (b) be too slow; (c) infinite loop. (Sadly, there will always be denial-of-service attacks.)

Second: there is no “memory” and “disk.” Your computer is permanent. All data is typed. All protocols are typed. Data structures and protocols constantly and seamlessly change. Public applications auto-update, as does the OS itself.

Third: the application architecture is fixed. All apps work the same way. Most architecture is just data modeling. Most programming is just dataflow. Any actual functions are actually algorithms. The semantics of an application are annotations on the data structure of its state.

Fourth: important invariants are static. It does not take dynamic execution analysis to know that your Gmail connector can only use your Gmail credentials to sign in to Gmail. It only takes static dataflow analysis. New apps and features should still be cognitively analyzed for sanity, but can be deterministically analyzed for safety and security.

Fifth: the OS executes in a cloud TEE. The server is opaque to the data center, and can migrate. Hosting is a commodity. The server has a name which is an NFT, whose owner owns the server. This name is also its network address. Servers can use the TEE to certify network applications. Hosts bill their servers, in crypto, by usage, not time.

With an OS like this, all code is shallow. The AI only has to be as smart as the problem it’s solving. And most problems are stupid. Building a true self-driving computer on this stack will not be trivial. But the stupider we can make its code, the more powerful the agent will be.

Now: especially when an OS of this type is young, when it has to trade off simplicity against generality, it should choose simplicity. So unusual use cases may fall outside its practical envelope. These are less likely to be encountered in a personal server. While the same virtues will serve this OS well in an enterprise context, the enterprise both demands more technical maturity, and has a longer sales cycle. To say nothing of government! But in theory, if a platform is general-purpose, you should be able to run the whole US Government off it.

Imagine you’re just little old you. But you knit. So you need a knitting app. Your friends knit too. So it’s a knitting circle. Of elite knitters. You start selling your knitting. Years go by. And you’re a multinational textile conglomerate. Still running on the same server.

And it’s not just knitting. Any such ecosystem will deliver end-to-end universal, anonymous, more or less unstoppable freedom of computing: the open society, whether you like it or not. Snce its anonymous names are crypto wallets, it also delivers freedom of commerce.

Isn’t this a compelling vision? I think it’s a compelling vision. I think it’s as compelling as the vision of a machine that can perform any medical test on a single drop of blood.

So… where are we on that, eh?

The present

I’ve been seriously working on this project for about a year. With my cofounder Zimran Ahmed (a Meta PM for 8 years, and a Harvard MBA), I started a little company called Urban Tiger. We’ve spent about a million dollars. We don’t have a self-driving computer yet. (Yes, we’re raising: see below.) Here’s what we do have.

Fortunately, most of the solution already existed before Urban Tiger, because I started working on it 25 years ago. It’s called Urbit. Unfortunately, there’s a small problem. Urbit already failed. (You can read about it in the Compact Magazine article, “The Rise and Fall of Urbit.”)

From an engineering standpoint, Urbit didn’t fail at all. Urbit works perfectly. It’s rock solid. We’ve been building on Urbit servers for a year and submitted (I believe) exactly one small bug report.

What failed was Urbit as a product. It was not a good product, and deserved to fail. This was still my fault, though I was not involved in Urbit while it was in the first round of its Gartner hype cycle. (I left the original Urbit company, Tlon, in 2018, after working on the stack alone from 2002 to 2013, then at Tlon from 2013 to 2018. In fall 2024 I spent a year at the Urbit Foundation, then founded Urban Tiger in fall 2025.)

Every new general-purpose OS has to lead with a special-purpose product experience. This experience has to be competitive at the YC level, with users who do not care about the technology. Building a “user base” of fans is a trap for a new platform, because fans (a) will tolerate a substandard user experience, and (b) are fickle and motivated by superficial concerns.

Tlon’s Urbit experience is usable. It’s actually pretty good. But it does not really unlock any particular pain point. It also has the major technical flaw that everyone in the chat needs their own server. This is because Tlon Messenger is the distant descendant of a distributed chat app I wrote in 2012 to see if I could build distributed applications on Urbit. Actually, chat doesn’t need to be distributed at all. Only the forum’s owner needs a server. The guests only need to own their names. (With our client, they can start a server with one click.)

So there’s a lot of things like that. When I was at Tlon, I focused on the core OS. Perhaps that was my real mistake. At Urban Tiger, with the standard Urbit core (Arvo), we’ve built a complete user experience from end to end—from a PWA wallet to a TEE cloud. Everything is self-custodied. We don’t have any user data we can read. You get your urbit straight from the Ethereum blockchain. You save it with a passkey and back it up with a six-word poem. Not that Tlon did a terrible job at all, but this is the Urbit experience I always wanted to build.

To the initial user, it doesn’t even feel like a general-purpose system. You don’t “install Urbit.” You click an invite link to join an Urbit lodge. You have to pick a name, set a passkey, install a Home Screen app and enable notifications. It’s harder than accepting a Partiful invite, but not much harder. And if you don’t have an invite, starting your own lodge isn’t even hard (just go to http://urbit.house).

An Urbit lodge is a digital secret society with untraceable names. As a UI, it’s actually halfway between a forum and a chat—it has a tree like a forum, but you flow through your unreads like a chat. (I stole this from Usenet.) It does everything to protect your identity—you can even set it to restyle posts with an LLM. It’s even a ZCash wallet, in case don’t want to be traced through your lodge dues.

I’m pretty sure this product doesn’t exist already. Does anyone need it? We’ll see.

Do you need it? Gosh, I hope so! Or rather, gosh, I hope not—because the only reason you need a lodge is that you’re in a social or professional context where you might be “held accountable” for speaking the truth under a traceable name. Which sucks. While it’s difficult to estimate the TAM for a “preference-defalsification” app, “everyone with an office job” is, alas, all too defensible.

Lodge is a cool product and I use it myself (if you have to ask, you’re not in %moldbug-club). Will it take over the world? I think so! And so does every 24-year-old fool in YC. (Tlon actually got into YC—in 2014. We didn’t go.) Statistics, however, suggest more caution.

But the only way to prove out a general-purpose platform is to build a special-purpose app and take it seriously, even existentially. The platform cannot be a drag on its applications! And the only way to prove this out is to ship a great product as if the platform didn’t matter, without compromising the generality of the stack.

So. We did that. But this is Urbit, and we’re not here to install an app. We’re here to reboot the world. To make AI more powerful, make its problem simpler. AI is already pretty powerful. And Urbit is a lot simpler.

Gnat

But still, Urbit wasn’t quite where it needed to be for unlimited normie vibecoding. Another breakthrough was needed. We think we have it, but more work is needed.

The last problem was Urbit’s application model, %gall—a typed, functional event-driven state machine. %gall works fine. It is very good for what it is. It can even do schema evolution and protocol adaptation, just somewhat clunkily. The underlying causal event system (which allows events to call and return) in Arvo is, I think, the best typed event system in the world.

But what happens when you write a big event state machine is that it’s all too easy to get—event spaghetti. Functional code is always the dual of procedural code. If your system can vibecode spaghetti, normies will vibecode spaghetti. So your system isn’t for normies.

Really the problem with %gall was that I never really finished the Urbit stack in 2013. I ran out of money and had to start a company. So the top layer, the application framework, was inadequately ambitious. Over time, from experience, the conviction among others in the Urbit ecosystem that %gall was not the right thing grew.

Unfortunately, most of the literal geniuses (and there have been many) who were attracted to the Urbit ecosystem were attracted to it because it was cool, and wanted to make their mark by adding something cooler. These people delivered many cool prototypes. They did not want to make something stupider (nor were they inclined to solve stupid problems). This is a common open-source issue.

What you see when you look at the %gall spaghetti is that it’s doing the same stupid thing over and over again: routing and dataflow. When the user level is solving the same problem over and over again, that’s usually a sign that you’re missing a systems layer.

For Will Hanlen (~rilryp-maplun) and I, what unlocked the new dataflow application model, %gnat (which of course fits the requirements above), was figuring out how to do typed diffs in Urbit. (The answer is: in the stupidest possible way.)

Typed diffs are the fundamental primitive of dataflow. Dataflow lets you track, minimize, and react to dependencies. A credential, for example, is data that can only flow to the appropriate request construction. If you try to leak it, your gnat will not compile. Also, the dataflow system makes schema and protocol adaptation easy—in fact, it makes them the same thing.

Yet %gnat is not a toy. Not just in theory but actually in practice, you could put the whole scene graph for a Pixar movie in your urbit’s brain, and render the frames with %gnat. (You would want asynchronous rendering.) The standard data model is like a slightly-deformed SQL, and %gnat is also good at indexing. And schema evolution. Add a column to a database? No problem. Add a variable to a structure? Same thing. Heck, you can even build an event-state machine in a spreadsheet cell. All these conventional patterns are the same thing and fit very cleanly in Urbit’s noun model.

This is why the Urbit stack with %gnat will enable the self-driving computer: because it is dumb, yet general.

While a %gall app is already much, much dumber than anything on Unix that solves the same problems (schema evolution, etc), %gnat is still dumber and much more legible. And actually faster, though you wouldn’t expect that from switching from custom event writing to generic diffs. Will translated Lodge into an early version of %gnat:

These are still rookie numbers. I actually don’t think Lodge should be more than 250 lines.

Endgame

So what are the actual barriers to Urbit as a self-driving computer?

We need to nail down and polish %gnat. That’ll take another month or two. (In a couple of weeks I’ll post more documentation.) Then we’ll have to figure out how to teach an LLM to do a really good job of writing gnats. That won’t happen overnight, either.

There’s a few things about the stack that could work better. We shouldn’t be writing UIs for Urbit in React and running them in an iframe. An app client should be an Urbit moon, with its own UI toolkit. On the hosting side, we should be auto-jetting: identifying interpreted bottlenecks and translating them into verified Rust. For various legacy calculations, and for captive browsing, we probably still need a sandbox. There’s a bunch of reasonably straightforward, but nontrivial, feature work like this.

All system software is based on tradeoffs. Is this platform, Urbit with the %gnat stack, shallow enough that the strange centaur of a human normie riding an autistic-genius LLM can’t tangle itself up in spaghetti and footguns? Is it deep enough that the LLM can actually write the apps you need? Surely it will be too deep in some ways, too shallow in other ways. It’ll have to be fine-tuned.

But the great thing about a self-driving computer is: it doesn’t need an ecosystem. It doesn’t need apps. It doesn’t need programmers. Once the clankers are good at coding it, everyone can use it tomorrow. For the entire history of system software, momentum has created monopoly—conflicting with the fundamental systems goal of simplicity. Once all software is written by LLMs, the platforms that make it easiest for LLMs to write safe, secure, reliable software will just win—however exotic the platform.

AI has taught us many things. One is how much we were relying on security by obscurity. On any 21st-century stack, Urbit or anything else, “security” as we know it is no longer a thing. There is no ambient authority. Security assertions are declarative and statically checked. So long as there are no holes in the interpreter, “cybersecurity” is over. (Except denial-of-service attacks.)

Yes, Urban Tiger is raising. I’ll be in New York if anyone wants to hear a pitch Nov 1, London Nov 3-9, then back to the Bay Area. Serious investors: reply to this email if you want to hear a pitch. Software is no longer a moat—only system software is a moat. Don’t miss the last system-software revolution.

And check out https://urbit.house. Make a lodge! (Be advised—we haven’t started putting servers in TEEs yet. A couple weeks.)