Igor Costa (@igorcosta) header
Igor Costa (@igorcosta) profile picture

Building https://teapawt.net/t.co/25bFODy8ou , former @Microsoft, @GitHub, @AWS.

New Zealand
Joined April 2007
Photo by Igor Costa (@igorcosta)Photo by Igor Costa (@igorcosta)Photo by Igor Costa (@igorcosta)Photo by Igor Costa (@igorcosta)Photo by Igor Costa (@igorcosta)Photo by Igor Costa (@igorcosta)Photo by Igor Costa (@igorcosta)Photo by Igor Costa (@igorcosta)Photo by Igor Costa (@igorcosta)Photo by Igor Costa (@igorcosta)
I'd like to share a few thoughts and observations I've seen on my timeline here, I find it interesting when people wonder whether software is becoming a solved problem, whether AI will eliminate the moats in software, or whether there is anything left to build. LT;DR. Software is still the MOAT. let me share my side of the story. I never assume malice when I read these posts. I understand where the concern comes from, and I want to share how I see it. 1. Excel might be the best example of why simple primitives win. Excel is arguably one of the most successful pieces of software ever built. Why? Rows and columns give people a simple way to organise data, build models, run calculations, and present information however they want. The power is not in what Excel does out of the box. It is in what people can make it do. Much of the software industry has been trying to improve on that basic idea: give people primitives they can use to solve their own problems. 2. Software factories are about personalised software. I often see the term Software Factory to describe a new way of producing software faster and thousands of PRs, but i see software factory as more of its that is personalised, adaptable, and shaped around the needs of the people using it. look how @badlogicgames did with pi and @steipete did for openclaw. Until now, if your software did not do what you needed, you had to wait for the vendor to ship an update, pay someone to change it, or build something else. That constraint is starting to disappear. You can change the software yourself. You can make it fit your work, rather than changing your work to fit the software. 3. Being able to build something does not mean everyone will. Walk into Home Depot and look at all the circular saws. The tools to build things are available, but not everyone buys one. Not everyone wants to build their own furniture, either. Some people want to make things. Others want to buy them. Many will do both. Software will be no different. The ability to build your own tools does not eliminate the market for products. It gives people more choices. 4. Software is becoming accessible to a new group of builders. What is software, after all? It is a way to turn needs, ideas, and processes into something a computer can execute. For decades, the cost and expertise required to produce software created a high barrier to entry. AI is lowering that barrier. People with good ideas can now build tools for themselves, their families, their communities, and their businesses. They do not have to convince a vendor that their problem is worth solving. That creates a much larger group of people who can participate in the software economy. 5. Software 3.0 opens up more problems to solve, not fewer. @karpathy and others have written about Software 3.0. Whatever terminology we settle on, we are entering a new phase in how software is created and used. or @tobi with Qmd, out of request, it would cost him way more than a few prompts and tokens, it would cost more money and more time to build. One vendor, one model, or one agent harness will not serve every need in this new economy. Think about it for a second. If AI agents are already solving so many mundane problems, why are my friends working at frontier labs and AI startups sleeping less? Because we are working on a new set of problems. The old constraints are falling away, and we are discovering what becomes possible when they do. 6. Every layer of the stack can become adaptable. Think about the entire chain, from the software used to design a transistor to the software powering a fighter jet, an industrial machine, or a mobile app. Every layer has the potential to become more adaptable to the needs of its users. That includes the models themselves. We should be able to distil and adapt models to the needs of the people using them, including through private and local deployments. The data and knowledge used to train these systems came, in large part, from human activity and collective work. We should be building ways for people to benefit from that intelligence directly. 7. New abstractions create new jobs. Look back at the rise of reactive architectures and digital transformation. People worried about how new tools and architectures would change the roles of frontend and backend developers. The industry did not stop needing software engineers. New abstractions helped create the full-stack developer, a role that could work across boundaries that previously separated teams. We should expect similar changes again. Some jobs will disappear, others will change, and new roles will emerge around problems we have not yet learned how to solve. Making something easier to build removes a constraint. It also creates room for new products, businesses, and careers. Consider dental floss and toothpicks. Dental floss did not make toothpicks obsolete. In Brazil, Gina has built a major toothpick business, with reported production of around 40 million units a day. A better or newer solution does not automatically eliminate the demand for an existing one. People have different needs, habits, and preferences. 8. Taste and understanding the user become the moat. If everyone can build software, simply having the ability to build it becomes less of an advantage. What matters is understanding which problems are worth solving, how people want to solve them, and what makes a product worth returning to. That requires more than waiting for feedback. It means observing how people use software, where they struggle, what they change, and what they build on top of it. It means giving users the tools to adapt the product themselves, while learning from those adaptations to improve the experience for everyone. This is why I started with Excel. Its lasting value is not just its spreadsheet. It is the freedom it gives people to create things the original developers never anticipated. I believe the next generation of successful software companies will understand this. The opportunity is not simply to build software faster. It is to create software that people can make their own, let them choose, ship in a way they can truly own their data and the way you ship will get the attention it deserves. The barrier to creating software is falling. The number of problems we can solve is growing. And I think we are still at the beginning. - I wrote about the future of new roles soon, teapawt.net/compose/articles/edit/… and @GeoffreyHuntley recently wrote about interviewing process for this new kind of role here teapawt.net/GeoffreyHuntley/status… gist.github.com/igorcosta/bb…
🗞️ if your team is too busy doing their 'normal job' to experiment with AI, you're preparing them to be replaced ghuntley.com/replaced/ In this post, I guess this's the last time I'll say it. AI use is no longer optional if you wish to be employed. What follows is advice for current employees and hiring managers on how to hire in 2026 to source AI-first candidates.
2
1
3
422
LinkedIn is a total sloppy, they are not alone. Showing fake status on posts on Autohand and when you click nothing there. We are not immune from the same issue our agents decide to write a entire wall of fake lies and testimonies from users that never been ours. They published the pages and translated into 8 locales. While I was sleeping. We tight knot on our side. Even with all release controls they just decided to fake it.
25
the only apps i actually care about it.
50
Anything you want to build, whenever you’re ready. autohand.ai/code/desktop/
1
1
1
266
I've been doing a phone call with my chief of staff every day on my comute from work, it's the most hyped team i've ever worked with. Better than listening to podcast or listening to music.
For the past six months, I’ve had swarms of AI agents building software for me. From training models and running benchmarks to building self-evolving systems and desktop applications, we’ve been pushing the limits of what agents can do. Now I’m taking them into a new domain: office work. At Autohand, we’re exploring what happens when agents move beyond writing code and start handling everyday business tasks, from admin work to helping people integrate their workflows with Autohand Code. I’m starting with 100 agents. So far, 85% of tasks have been completed without human supervision. The agents are running on Autohand Squad, our open-source platform for working with AI agents. github.com/autohandai/squad The model powering this experiment is TUI, a 9-billion-parameter model specialised in office work. TUI stands for Task-Oriented User Interface. The name is also a nod to the tūī, a native New Zealand bird. The setup is simple: • TUI provides the model. • Autohand Squad coordinates the agents. • Autohand Code connects the work to software development and real workflows. We’ve spent years building tools that help people write software with AI. I believe the next step is giving agents the ability to take on entire workflows, not just generate code. 100 agents. 85% of tasks completed without supervision. We’re just getting started. I’ll share what we learn.
37
I demoed Tui our internal model for office desk work to a few friends, I asked Moa to teach a new model based off fantail and i did similar approach here. It's finally going to be mainstream in 2028. You can literally do dynamic tool calling for a model to modify it's own tensors on the fly.
We asked GPT-6 Astra to edit Qwen3.5-0.8B weights to improve math. It directly changed only 0.016% of weights, fixing 0.8B's reasoning loops & improving math up to 6x and even instruction following 3x, without gradients or training. We call this Weight-Space Programming: frontier LLMs can now natively read/write neural network weights! 🧵 Blog: rikiyat.github.io/blog/weigh…
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
LLM was given weights explicitly as text in prompt and used code/forward passes (per authors' logs) to ablate Qwen looping direction, a known thinking-mode issue per model card. Primarily fixed repetition in that mode, not general 'natively' improving weights/math. rikiyat.github.io/blog/weight-sp… github.com/RikiyaT/lm_und… huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.5-0… huggingface.co/RikiyaT/Qwen3.…
58
We understand through our partner ecosystem that your company may be exploring additional compute capacity. I wanted to reach out directly to see if there might be an opportunity to connect with you and your team, understand your requirements, I got 4 neo clouds offering “free compute” first year on 3yrs commitment. No thanks. We got that covered. @elonmusk was right. DRAM is like GameStop.
2
129
We're running into constant constraints at autohand.ai The demand has increased A LOT. such a good problem to have. I made the executive decision to support more paid customers. We reduce a few free tiers. Before we had 2GB cache support Now we have 1 GB cache support Before we had 150 messages free now down to 50 messages free Before KV_cache from 60 minutes Now KV_cache to 30 minutes. I know it sucks for free users, but we're bootstrapping and we love our users but paid customers have a special space in our hearts. No further more.
63
Since @elonmusk and @xai can't give our account @autohandai We just released our latest coding agent in the market 0.9.9 comes with a ton of new features and bug fixes. github.com/autohandai/code-c… autohand upgrade for the thousands of users already using. if you're new to the game download via autohand.ai/code/cli/
1
1
89
RAM memory is about to get as cheap as bananas.
2
148
I should explain a bit more my theory on this. The biggest 5 providers are expecting rapid expansion of Neoclouds providers buying NAND and nvme at a higher pace than what is currently forecast. If @elonmusk is right on consolidation of neo cloud providers, there's a surplus of offer. Guess what happens when you have over supply and stock? Retail users can buy galore at a lower price.
30
Can I design drugs and medicine the same way I design code? There's only one way to find out!
78
Igor Costa retweeted
Frontier labs are advancing the capabilities in AI for biology but preventing the good guys (scientists, academia, non-profits, health agencies,...) to use, study and understand it with widespread but shallow guardrails that the bad guys are bypassing easily (blocked me to proofread this tweet for example 😅). This will automatically create massive assymetry and risks in the coming years, just like in cybersecurity, especially now that frontier labs are building wet labs (HF cybersecurity scenario for biology when?). This is why we created Carbon-X, the best open-source DNA model by midtraining Qwen3-14B on 300B tokens of DNA, English and interleaved data. We also used a hybrid tokenizer that tokenizes English with BPE and DNA with a 6-mer tokenizer. As a result, Carbon-X outperforms all open language models we evaluated on five benchmarks of DNA understanding and generation. This is a 27-point improvement over Qwen3-14B, showing how much a language model can gain from DNA training. It is also API frontier level at 1,800x less cost than GPT 6.1 Sol! We hope Carbon-X helps researchers explore DNA in new ways. Releasing it openly means anyone can study its capabilities, limitations, and risks. Let's make the AI biology frontier open-source to make it safe and impactful for the whole world (not just a few companies). Apache 2.0 Model on @huggingface: huggingface.co/HuggingFaceBi…
82
165
22
1,316
92,672
We're making Autohand Software Factory available for a few selected startups. If you're at a breakneck speed, get early access to ours the first 1B token is on us. autohand.ai/code/assembly/
51
I love to see sci-fi craft in the hands of the crowd. Kudos to team. They achieved what @autohandai is doing and finally we are not alone.
78