asim

Personal AI. Step by step evolving something I worked on for 10 years from an open source Go framework to APIs to apps and now agents. It's been an interesting journey. It's not finished yet. It's also not going to be a billion dollar company or have breakout success like OpenClaw but when you tackle personal problems I think they turn into more valuable opportunities. The opportunity to learn or have something that benefits a few people. I can't take off my entrepreneurial hat though. I keep trying to figure out how to make it work for everyone but I think that's the trap. Build for yourself. The rest will come.

Originally I felt there should be an alternative to Google and Facebook. It felt like our lives were being ruled by tech giants even ten years ago..and then all the advertising and algorithms really messed with us. I personally wanted an alternative way to use the web. So it's based around what I'd use on a daily basis. And then the idea of being able to extend it with a native app builder. The big stuff I continue to build with Go but ad-hoc things I can knock out with some JS in the app itself.

Its open source (https://github.com/micro/mu).

A few things:

Reminder.dev - Quran app and API that includes RAG search to provide a more authenticated source of summarisation. The first thing I dabbled in with AI.

Micro.mu - Rebuilt my entire product idea from 10 years ago as a super app for daily digital habits. Something I use everyday for myself.

Aslam.org - An islamic knowledge base that uses sources of data as a way to ground AI chat and make notes. Very useful tool that I'm using on a daily basis.

Go-micro.dev - Totally revamped the open source project, docs, etc with Claude.

I think there's a lot that doesn't get built initially especially around error management and more feature completeness around how the response will be shaped. I think it's an interesting demonstration in how to leverage an existing system of services for AI but definitely more to do. Thanks for asking.

Edit: One other thing I kept out was code generation — the agent can call services but doesn't create them. I've just built it: `micro run --prompt "a task management system"` generates real services, builds them, starts them, and the agent can use them immediately. The agent can build new services on the fly.

Blog post here: https://go-micro.dev/blog/13

It's definitely a core component of a bigger system. We are effectively trying to recreate intelligence and human life through models and robotics. So the key insights for me, the LLM is the cerebral cortex but we have a lot more to recreate. Once you map in sensory input continuously and give it physical robotics, things start to change. But even before that leaving these things in simulated realities is what will happen, and right now we have things that operate based on our commands, but a complete step function will be the things that act on their own and that will be a very dangerous time but also where we see some very surreal things happening. They might not necessarily be made in the same way either, they might operate on entirely different types of architecture.

That's a great explainer, thanks for sharing it.

We are now entering the closed loop game. Google doesn't need anyone else to accelerate their models. This is their bread and butter.

I'm both shocked but also not surprised that they continue to develop such efficiencies. Honestly it's like silicon and CPU architecture advancement. We kept shrinking it and shrinking it and it kept getting more and more powerful and here we are with AI and it's only going to be 100x more efficient with time. Maybe there's some point of decay but essentially the next 30 years will be more advanced than the last 30 and were going to be living in some sort of futurist blade runner scenario where gene editing is repairing ageing cells, organs and curing all sorts of cancers that haven't even appeared yet. Beyond our lifetimes people will live to 125 quite steadily and with great mobility and then obviously people will look to how do we get to living 1000 years, which of anyone is religious knows Noah and others lived to that age in a totally different era.

Anyway I'm going off on some tangent but look back 30 years. Now look forward 30 years. It's going to be insane. May God protect us.

Love how everyone boasted about replacing all the software with ChatGPT and then we end up with coding agents meaning the software engineer are STILL important. The sell is the development tool. It's classic cloud. Where did all the ops people go, many got subsumed by the cloud companies YET every company still has DevOps people to manage cloud infrastructure. The layer of abstraction went up but we still need the people to write the glue code and understand the business. OK great there's a new cash printer in the room. There's a new tool. Let's just start to ground the tooling in its new found gravity, profitability and IPO market dynamics... Reality has set in. The hype cycle is about to explode... Do you remember ride hailing and just how much cash was burned on credits pre Uber IPO. Then remember the IPO itself? These companies are not the new Google. They are a layer on top. Google was still the most efficient cash printing machine in history beyond the the US government and might still be. Will be interesting to see what the trillion dollar IPOs turn into. I'm going to say we see those prices get cut to a third in less than 5 years and scale back up over the next 15-20 years.

Every so often there is a trend and a hype cycle. It eventually dissipates. There's value in what gets built but it also becomes the silver bullet or the hammer used for everything. In 2-3 years it's going to die off, it becomes the norm technology trend but it's also part of a larger suite of foundational tooling, meaning so much of it is going to fade into the background and we're going to get back to good old problem solving. Doesn't mean we shouldn't learn and understand but yes we're all going to get burned out on AI chatter.

Good for them. We built similar tooling at that time, but backed by our own APIs. It's something that has a lot of value, that standardisation needs to exist, but it also makes a lot of sense to fold the team into a company like Anthropic that is so developer centric. Good luck to the team there.

The same thing for 10 years and every couple years it gets reimagined while trying to get to the original goal of building a replacement for Google. It's called Micro.

https://micro.mu

Ah man the VC death trap. It's ok. I don't mean it like that but this is classic. It's unavoidable. They gotta make money. They took money, they gotta make money. It's not easy. Everyone has principles, developers more than anyone. They are developers, they are people like you and me. They didn't even start as ollama. They started as a kubernetes infra project in YC and pivoted. Listen don't be hard on these guys. It's hard enough. Trust me I did it. And not as well them.

This is the game. We shouldn't delude ourselves into thinking there are alternative ways to become profitable around open source, there aren't. You effectively end up in this trap and there's no escape and then you have to compromise on everything to build the company, return the money, make a profit. You took people's money, now you have to make good, there's no choice. And anyone who thinks differently is deluded. Open source only goes one way. To the enterprise. Everything else is burning money and wasting time. Look at Docker. Textbook example of the enormous struggle to capture the value of a project that had so much potential, defined an industry and ultimately failed. Even the reboot failed. Sorry. It did.

This stuff is messy. Give them some credit. They give you an epic open source project. Be grateful for that. And now if you want to move on, move on. They don't need a hard time. They're already having a hard time. These guys are probably sweating bullets trying to make it work while their investors breathe down their necks waiting for the payoff. Let them breathe.

Good luck to you ollama guys!

I don't know why in 2026 I'm still surprised CLIs are taking off. But here's the difference today. It's for real world end user platforms like WhatsApp and Claude. That's the difference. Previously it was only Dev and infrastructure focused. Today we're saying you know what, I need programmatic access to this real world thing. It's fascinating because I rarely open my laptop now or try not to.

Who are these people using the cli?

Nothing is worth $852B in that space of time unless they are printing more than half of that in cash which to be clear they are not. They are burning it at that rate. Let's be clear. It's a valuable company, a valuable product, a valuable technology. It set the trend for the next phase of computer usage. But it's not worth $852B in that span of time and when it goes public that reality will bear down on them quickly.

It's a falling knife. Don't try catch it on the way down. That valuation might be justified in another 10 years.

Thank you

Oh sorry it's a personal project. I wasnt expecting to receive emails. You can contact me at xxx

Micro - apps without the ads, algorithms or tracking. https://micro.mu

The business model is likely going to revolve around mcp and x402 https://micro.mu/developers/

I wish this is the point at which we could create a true alternative to the app stores. This is the moment we could escape the walled gardens. Yes a lot of those who are happy in their ecosystems will stay, but for the ones making the apps, I think there are better alternatives, especially now with PWAs. I think now more than ever is an opportunity to invest in a PWA based mini app platform.

Kudos to Sid for trying it and hopefully it benefits others in the long run. Not everyone has the money, will or commitment to do this. My own father died with a battle of myeloma, a blood and bone marrow cancer, after 2 years, it wasn't the disease specifically that got him, it was the secondary conditions that caused irregular heart rhythm and eventually one day it stopped and no one was there to help. 2 stem cell transplants, rounds of chemo, almost full failure of kidneys. The cancer did its job. Ultimately what I'm saying, the medicine gives us time, but no one beats death. Maybe the treatment gives us time to come to terms with that, hopefully my dad did. I was in total denial. Anyway good luck to you Sid.

All the best to all the cancer survivors out there, and to the loved ones who lost them.

Glad to receive the approval!

Hey. Thanks! I'm using RSS feeds to pull the news and it's updated hourly. No charge for viewing headlines. News search charged.

https://mu.xyz/wallet

Why? I want to understand why? Out of principle? I think some services just end up becoming foundational and we need to move on to other things for other things e.g if we're going to replace GitHub it's because we're creating new habits. Not because we're replacing like for like. That never works. What is a new code hosting platform offering. You know what, pair it with some app dev and great, now you've got something. But just hosting elsewhere it's got to be a major step change the way GitHub was from sourceforge and self hosting. Inherently the social aspects drove that and the power of git. Personally I think you have to intertwine the code hosting with app development using agents like a Google doc. Commits everytime there is a change. Every prompt creates a commit. I don't know. We don't need to reinvent the wheel for nothing.

It will come. The problem is. So will the addictive stuff. The key is going to be real meaningful connection. Social media wasn't about community. Web 2.0 was. In 2005 we were connecting with real people we knew and probably up until 2011-2012 maybe we still were, but I guess friends of friends, colleagues, people in our network. Then it got really bad.

Getting back to community is key.

Well tbh I think it's like cloud in 2007-2009. I was highly skeptical and heckling while running on managed bare metal everytime there was an outage. But now cloud is the standard model for anything really. And I think AI becomes the gold standard for code in the long term. So yea right now lots of outages. In a couple years it'll be much better. And in ten years people will always default to automation via AI.

Sometimes I think my opinion means nothing on these topics, especially when it's going to get buried in a thread of 500 plus comments. But I think you finally see a little bit of a flaw in the strategy or just a little bit of insight into what was desperation for relevance and to try to very quickly attain what other companies have attained but essentially what they're seeing is this gradual reduction in ambition and it's only natural for a lot of companies to overreach, but essentially reality and gravity are pulling them back. And as some other people have mentioned wall Street and others see that coding is the prime use case for this where you can make money and have a really profitable business and there are auxiliary functions. Driving addictive content is not really one that should be at the forefront and while many will continue to do that and we'll have all this generative content, I think consumers are slightly smarter now that they don't want to be drawn into this kind of addictive toxic content.

Over time we're probably going to see some really broad and strong use cases of AI, but I think in the case of social media or generative content, we have to be a lot more thoughtful about it. And I'm glad that they're shutting down this app as much as it's great to see innovation and technology and to see how far it's pushed. I prefer to see it when someone like Google does it? Because they're really doing it from the standpoint of this has broad applicable applications to something like simulation or training. Not whatever open AI was doing which honestly just doesn't feel very truthful. I feel like they say one thing and do something else or they say one thing and the agenda or something else. And again, I don't know how helpful it is to comment like this, but I feel like if you understand the truth then you should speak the truth even if it only benefits one other person to hear it.

Come on man. This stuff is hard. I was the guy on the other side writing these BS hit pieces. Then I raised funding and took a shot. It's so hard. It's like pushing a boulder up a mountain except you're expected to build a rocket ship on the way and blast off. It's not the analogy of falling off a cliff and building the rocket on the way down. Sure death is on the horizon and you can manage it, but the pressures are immense and so much of it you can't game. Initial hype is intoxicating and you might even have something of value but real business takes time. It's a boulder up a hill and you need to bring a lot of good people along the way to help you. OpenAI was 7 years of nothing working then boom. I hit 7 years and fatigue set in, but also life, I wasn't that same guy who started at 30. Give these people a break. Ryan has done great things with Node and Deno. Give him a break. Don't stomp on the guy. Give him some kudos. Help him FFS. Don't trash him. Shame honestly. Ryan keep up the great work. It's hard. Deno team, it's the effort and intention that counts. Good work. Regroup, try again.

I'm healthily skeptical of new technology. Meaning I'm not the early adopter. But I've also found over the years I don't get left behind. I become curious at the time things are stabilising. Maybe on the cusp where there's still a lot of pushback but there's also clear value. Crypto in 2014-2017. AI in 2023-2024. You don't have to feel FOMO but if you're a technologist, if you have a healthy desire to evolve, change and learn then you'll naturally pick things up. I went from total crypto skepticism in 2014 to investing most of what I had. I went from total AI skepticism to doing RAG for the Quran and agentic tech for the small web. I think there's value in staying true to who you are but also naturally discovering and learning on your own timeline.

It was inevitable until the point all apps will disappear and AI will be the entry point for all work. You can see how anything required appear based on a single request. After which world models and other forms of interaction that are more dynamic will make sense and we'll need something that's not a screen.

For about a year I've been working on Mu - an app for everything without ads, algorithms or exploits. https://mu.xyz

Blog, news, chat, video, mail, web. Basically all the daily habits as little micro apps in one thing. I find it quite useful. Not sure anyone else does yet though.

Also separately worked on Reminder.dev which is a Quran app and API that bakes in LLM based search and motivational reminders.

Does group AI chat not exist already? I thought this was a thing. It makes sense as a product. Any examples?