AONYX

Open Source After Code

A manifesto by Jan David Nose and Martijn Arts

Open source was a bet: share the code and software gets better for everyone. The bet paid off. Nearly all software runs on it.

The next people to make software are not developers. Agents will write most of the code and file most of the issues. But all of open source’s tooling was built for developers reading each other's code, from the pull request down to the diff.

Open source is the best way to make software. It is about to move up one layer, from code to intent. This is the world we see coming.

1. Every user is a maker.

The cost of making software is falling to the cost of describing it.

When adapting is cheap, people stop running the same software and start making it their own.

The person who knows the work is the right person to build the software.

2. Intent is the medium.

What has always mattered is domain expertise, knowing how the work actually gets done.

Software will be developed by defining intent, not by writing code. Anyone can express intent.

People decide what software does. Agents make it happen. Test scenarios prove it works.

The code stays available for anyone who wants it.

3. The feature is the unit.

Millions of makers already exist. They build alone, in spreadsheets and prompts, with nowhere to collaborate on their intent.

The unit of collaboration is the feature: one outcome, named in a sentence, checked by scenarios. Small enough to reason about on its own. Precise enough for an agent to build. Composable enough for ambitious projects.

A feature describes an outcome, not an implementation. Each app gets its own implementation. What is shared is the intent and the scenarios.

4. Every app is a composition.

Forks make trees and features make networks.

An app is a composition of many features from across the network.

Improve one feature, and every app that uses it improves too.

Collaboration moves across the network, not up and down a single upstream.

Open source, after code.

We want to see a commons for features. Bring your own agent. Take your code anywhere.

We want the same commons to run inside companies, where most domain experts work, so that they can contribute their expertise to the network.

We believe open source can be bigger than it has ever been once makers can participate.

This takes a new forge, built for the next generation of makers.

So we are building it.

GitHub became the home of open source, the place where software developers share code and collaborate.

We are building the home for open source after code: software made by the people who use it, with agents, in a medium above code.

Two makers, one feature

Ana runs projects at a software company. She spends an hour telling an agent how her company works: what a ticket is, what a review is, and who sits on which team. Then she asks for a tool that shows every change waiting on a reviewer for more than two days. It is running that afternoon.

Ben runs projects somewhere else. He built himself a morning digest that posts to Slack, and he published it as a feature.

Ana follows Ben’s feature, and her list arrives in Slack every morning. One more sentence, and it comes grouped by team. When Ben improves the digest, Ana’s improves with it.

Neither of them has written a line of code.

Why us

Jan David Nose led the Infrastructure Team of the Rust Project for three years, and as Head of Infrastructure at the Rust Foundation was responsible for shipping Rust packages and releases to millions of users. A registry of features has to be built, operated, and scaled the same way.

Martijn Arts was the first engineer at Headroom, among the first to build AI products for people who do not write code, and he founded RCKIVE before that. At Palantir he sat with analysts and turned their work into the product suite that won a top-five pharma company, understanding deeply how to build products for a non-technical audience.

We have seen open source strain at scale from the inside, and agents fail in the tools built to guide them. We know how to fix it.

Talk to us at jd@aonyx.ai.