24: Building FIPS w/ Johnathan Corgan — No Solutions

"Don't be afraid of going your own way."

Johnathan Corgan & Gigi take a walk in Madeira. Recorded during SEC-07.

Listen on sovereignengineering.io

In this dialogue:

Why FIPS started with Arjen asking for networking that does not depend on registrars, central authorities, or yankable domain names
Johnathan disappearing for a month after Costa Rica, then returning with a protocol design that scratched the itch
FIPS as a self-organizing peer mesh: no privileged coordinator, only what each node can enforce locally
Transport-agnostic networking: Ethernet, Bluetooth, UDP overlays, Tor, serial links, and whatever else can move packets
A hilariously impractical but very useful test: tunneling FIPS over Nostr relays, with ping times measured in seconds, and it still worked
Why robustness under ugly conditions matters more than looking elegant on the happy path
150 nodes already on the FIPS testnet, and what has to change to get from 150 to 1,500 to 15,000
Friday Demo Day as the forcing function: build it, show it, let other people poke holes in it
The next FIPS release: fewer unnecessary pieces, stronger protocol negotiation, harder internals, more battle testing
"Try to break it" so friends can fix it before hostile actors do
Costa Rica and SEC-07 as a return to the early Cypherpunk and early Bitcoin energy: do not reform the old system, route around it
Why Nostr feels miraculous if you remember the world before it, even if normies still see it as half-baked
"Rough consensus and running code": academic rigor, design review, and why code still has to survive contact with reality
Johnathan's critique of "shower thought to ZapStore in six hours" culture: speed helps, but engineering still matters
Claude Code wrote most of FIPS only after two months of protocol iteration and roughly 30,000 words of design docs
Johnathan read every file and every line of code his agents produced, which is probably the only sane way to use them
Agentic coding as a force multiplier, not a substitute for thought: bad programmers get worse, good programmers get faster, non-programmers can finally build
Drive-by AI pull requests, effort-matching reviews, and why maintainers should not do all the thinking for you
Advice to younger builders: dissent, trust your own judgment, stop scrolling, and start doing stuff
"You can just do things"

Related dialogues:

People mentioned:

Arjen (brought the original itch from Costa Rica, noDNS instincts, freedom-tech networking)
Cobrador (TollGate, weird deployment constraints, "I didn't think this would exist for 10 more years")
SatsAndSports

Projects & tech mentioned:

FIPS (Free Internetworking Peering System, a transport-agnostic encrypted mesh)
Nostr
TollGate (connectivity sold by the packet in hostile or weird environments)
Tor
ZapStore

Recorded at 945,297.