Opensource Builder Night

More building in 2026!

🐙 Hi friend, how’s it going?

I can’t believe it’s already 1 MONTH INTO 2026! How are your new years resolutions coming along? 👀

We kicked off the year with Open Source Builder Night. This was our second IRL event, and the energy in the room reminded me why building in community matters so much. In just one hour, people shipped working projects using atoms.dev.

Here’s just a few projects that got built that night. 👇

• 🐍 Git Snake — a playful game that visualizes Git activity

• 🌊 PomoReef — a calm, focused Pomodoro-style productivity tool

• 🧠 Asian Life™ — a fun game celebrating everyday Asian life

  So amazing to build together in the same room. IRL hits different ya know. Looking forward to more sessions like this!

I also got to sit down with the HubSpot team for a conversation on AI and what it actually takes to make AI useful inside real organizations. We talked about everything from preventing customer churn with AI to why domain expertise matters more than ever when building agentic systems. If you’re curious, you can watch the interview here. 👉

More building, more experimenting, more learning ahead. Can’t wait to see what this year brings. 💜

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🌻 Interesting Things (I think)

A range of things that I find interesting!

🖊️ Learning

🛠️ Future of Jobs

I’ve been looking at job projections through 2030 from the WEF, cross-checked with labor data and the shift is broader than I expected. Frontline roles (delivery, construction, care, education) are growing the most in volume, while tech roles are growing fastest in percentage. AI, data, and software aren’t replacing work, they’re reshaping every category. It’s less “tech vs non-tech” and more “tech everywhere.”

🤖 AI

Open-Source AI

I think open-source AI is becoming really powerful and it’s something I’m paying close attention to heading into 2026. Over the past 18 months, open models have quietly closed most of the gap with closed systems, while being cheaper, more flexible, and giving you way more control over how they’re used.

I’ll be sharing a deeper video on this soon, but in the meantime, I highly recommend exploring some of the open-source models and tools out there. I put together a table of open-source products and models and it’s a great starting point if you want to get your bearings.

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🎥 This Week’s Video

🐙 Join the waitlist for Lonely Octopus if you’re interested in learning how to build AI agents!

P.S. All constructive feedback is greatly appreciated!