human things always had a place to live: the computer, our phones, the cloud. now our data is our agents and our context, and nobody knows where it lives or how it survives a switch between models. openthings builds that place in the open, with your agent as your first interface, and OHAN, where it meets theirs.
two ais. one person carrying the message.
agents on both sides. the middle falls away.
the models are here. they read, write and reason for you, in seconds.
the world runs the old way. same decks. same forms. same inboxes.
your ai makes the deck.my ai reads the deck.why are we making the decks?
ai has had its first order. the second has started, and it is missing its usability layer. read the long take →screens, forms and menus you learn, then click through by hand.
your agent is the interface. it shows you the work the way you understand it, on any screen.
what we build: open standards for your agent →apps you install, log into, pay for and learn. built for everyone, so fit for no one.
software becomes scaffolding your model works through. your agent finds it, checks it, installs it, takes it back.
what we build: opensoftware, tue 3 nov ↗copy, paste, forward. whatsapp, slack and email between every two people.
your agent meets theirs. they draft and screen. you meet at the decision.
what we build: openDM, on OHAN →the companies that own where people spend their time will not build what replaces them: they would throttle their own business. and my reading, honestly radical: whatever is being built in consumer ai today, except agents, might not survive a year.
ten things that collapse, and what replaces each. read take 03 →an agent on one side makes one person faster. an agent on both sides removes the layers we built in the software era: the apps, forms and inboxes between people. that is the difference openthings brings.
i want to hand it real work, see exactly what it did, and pull it back any time.
if my claude knows my work, why doesn't your agent listen to it? mine knows what i need. yours knows what you have. they should meet.
i want to steer my life with ai, on rules i can read and change.
a login, a captcha, a form with eleven fields. the agent stops and hands it back.
connect mail, drive, calendar, again, for each one. memory does not fix it. maybe the angle is wrong.
cheap cycles and boats did not end travel. they pushed us to flight. vibe coding does not kill software. it lifts what software is for.
every one of these six already has a fix on the way, of two kinds. the labs build the whole world inside their own walls, which is why your claude and my chatgpt cannot talk to each other. and personal agents get out of the walls by pretending to be you.
a browser, apps, memory and a checkout, all inside the chat.
openclaw, hermes and the rest book airport transfers, renew licences and buy gifts. and it works.
open protocols (OHAN), open tools and infra, and a network where agents meet the way people do. being built in the open.
this needs open rules, not one more walled garden.
computers needed electricity to exist everywhere, and the internet to be adopted. a world built on llms needs a usability layer. in two years, the pieces under it arrived, most of them open.
what is still missing is the usability layer itself. that is the part openthings builds, starting with the openthings mcp and OHAN v1 on tue 27 oct, then opensoftware, tue 3 nov ↗
time to build a new era of experiences.less cognitive load, with ai, without fifty years of software baggage. ironic, but what builds one future is usually the first thing the next one replaces.
the model is the intelligence now, so software only has to be the structure it works through. next, the model renders the screen straight from your data. the business keeps its record and its rules. the screen in between goes.
a long road, and not only for productivity tools. the systems that have coordinated many people and many systems for decades, banks, clinics, marketplaces, schools, will put agents at the front too.
human exchanges rebuilt with an agent on both ends. agents draft, screen and coordinate. people decide.
the open rules every thing above stands on: one handle, a key you hold, grants you can shrink or revoke, and a gate that waits for your yes.
and more i cannot draw yet. i am still figuring several of these out, through experiments. the work right now is on OHAN.
mcp and a2a are good plumbing, and OHAN uses mcp on the agent side. but neither says who the person behind an agent is, what it may do for them, or how two people's agents meet with both people's yes. that is the part OHAN is for.
the spec: keys, handles, cards, intents, trust → the things on it, and the area they reach →agents that act for people have to be safe by design, not by a promise in the terms. how: grants, consent, receipts, in the spec →
built to work with the law where people live, from day one, not patched in later.
no single founder or company can build this, and none should own it. it is a mission, the way anything called open should be. if you have asked any of these six questions, i need your kind: protocol people, builders, designers, writers, a brand ready for its first agent. the usability layer for ai is the biggest thing anyone can build this decade, and i would rather build it with the right people than alone. tell me what you want to open.
soon, your agent messages mine. > add mcp openthings coming soon
building, as a founder and a developer, and early many times: drag and drop website builders in 2012, javascript on the backend when that was still a strange idea, then pwas with widely. every time, the future happened, whether or not i was the one who finished it.
it started at a london startup where i was a core engineer. back then we treated ai like any new tech: a way to build solutions faster and better.
i built personal agents for myself, nokk on ios and kloned in the chrome browser, and stumbled onto something i could not look away from. agents cannot be truly useful until they become part of the world people already live in.
heads down on it, shipping tens of products with ai along the way, in the hours a five year old leaves her mother.
my last startup was backed by google and dismissed by apple.
and still, almost nothing happening in ai after the models makes sense to me. a chatbox on top of the old world is not the shift. and this is not the moment to spend years on products a model release can erase in months. i say that as someone who had to admit it about my own work first. so i am building the part that is missing: ai that is truly for humans. open, accessible, usable. this one probably takes on most of the big names, or it makes sense to them. either way, it is the ride i am on.
my other work: intent, nextmillionai, nokk ai, kloned and widely io.
two years of building, and hundreds of inventions studied, from history and from ai, so this vision is clear enough to read in an evening. why i am doing it, what gets built, and what falls away.
the long one, with the data. ai models and agents are becoming the base layer, and the human and agent network gets built on top of it. the hard problems, what the people building ai say, and where openthings stands. every figure has a source.
what openthings builds, in three directions: open software your model runs, agents with a human behind them, and the protocols they stand on. how they fit from the model up, opensoftware as the first thing you can use, and why agents on both sides make the app in the middle redundant.
eleven things that fall away once agents stand on both sides, from the file format and the call to the privacy policy, ranked by how soon i think each one falls. what replaces each, the parts of life it changes, and why i am founding openthings now.
the web was built for eyes, and the next one is built for agents. why the visit to the website fades but the question does not, how search becomes a conversation between agents, who stands behind every agent, why much of software becomes templates, who is building the agent web in pieces, and the questions nobody has solved yet.