18: Rewriting TENEX w/ Pablo — No Solutions

"You're yelling at someone who is lying to you."

Pablo & Gigi take a drive. Recorded December 2025.

Listen on sovereignengineering.io

Projects & tech mentioned:

TENEX (multi-agent coordination on Nostr)
NDK (Nostr Development Kit)
NDK Swift & NDK Kotlin (native ports of NDK, vibe-coded)
nostrdb (embedded Nostr database)
Negentropy / NIP-77 (efficient event sync)
NIP-60 (Cashu wallets on Nostr)
Vercel AI SDK (multi-provider LLM abstraction)
Notedeck & Nostur
Olas (rebuilt with TENEX agents)

In this dialogue:

Bitcoiners in cars getting coffee: recording from the sun visor, Seinfeld style
TENEX rewritten "about a hundred times," now in TypeScript on Vercel AI SDK
The pain of supporting every LLM provider: Gemini returns encrypted reasoning tokens, every API has different subtleties
Removing structure to improve performance: deleting 80% of agent code makes agents work better
Agents defining their own workflow phases instead of having phases imposed on them
Composable workflows: the CEO agent doesn't need to know what the engineering director's workflow looks like
The parallel to human organizations: you can't hold all the information in your own mind
John Vervaeke and the idea that dialogue is how you solve the really hard problems
Participatory knowing: you don't understand Bitcoin until you actually use it
Agent wallets removed because "there was nothing for them to actually buy" -- a commune with no walls
$700/month running Opus for everything, replacing "like fucking 30 people"
Context windows are a non-issue when the hierarchy is deep enough: each atomic agent finishes fast
Henry Ford's insight applied to agents: each worker does an incredibly stupid task that takes five minutes
Agents are bad at self-correction, so they delegate competing implementations in disposable work trees, then compare notes
Confidence scores: the delegating agent monitors every 5-10 messages, checks if the sub-agent is going off the rails
"Once they are convinced that humans have seven legs, they will make up scientific papers to prove it to you"
NDK ported to Swift and Kotlin without looking at a single line of code: outbox compilation, negentropy syncing, offline publishing, NIP-60 support
Cross-platform frameworks are dead: "if you're just programming in English, React Native makes no sense"
The developer experience right now is "as bad as it's been, at least in our lifetimes"
"You're basically yelling at someone that is lying to you, that will take all the shortcuts"
Vibe coding flow state: sculpting code like marble, micro-adjustments every five seconds
"What if all I know of development is actually problematic? What if I just let go?"
Non-developers building real apps on Nostr thanks to vibe coding
The naming podcast: "Claude Opus, make up a name. Just put a U."
"I'm on vacation. The agents have been running the entire time. They've done amazing work."

Related dialogues:

Recorded at 929,726.