A standard, not apps
This is a philosophy I’ve been working on personally that I’m sure others have thought of too: instead of building apps, we build a creed plus a standard that the apps have to meet.
The way I frame it: we’ve had three technologies in living memory that promised to democratize power. The Internet promised open information; we got mass surveillance. Social media promised connection; we got loneliness and narrative control. AI is the third, and it’s being decided right now. The first two got captured because leaving was expensive. Your data, your audience, your workflows were hostages.
Two things changed in the last couple years that make this attempt winnable:
- Energy got cheap enough to own. Solar + batteries turned a monthly bill into a one-time asset.
- Digital labor got nearly free. All the “high-hanging fruit” nobody would ever build because there was no profit in it is suddenly a weekend of agent time.
So what I’m working toward isn’t a platform anyone joins or pays into. It’s:
- A curated set of free, open repos, each shipping with its own MCP server built in, so any agent can operate it
- The person’s only costs: their AI key (at cost) and whatever machine or cloud box they choose. Nobody in the middle takes a cut, and we never host anything for anyone
- Their agent deploys it, their instance is the single source of truth, and everything syncs to them
- Because everything speaks MCP, every third-party service is swappable. You can’t capture people who can leave. That’s the actual anti-capture mechanism: protocol, not promises
- “Curated” means certified against a checklist (deploys anywhere, backs itself up, secure by default, usable by conversation), not gatekeeping by taste
The one-line version is teach a man to fish: don’t build things that do things for people, build things that let people do it for themselves. And the masses who “don’t get AI yet” can be taught, which is the whole point.
The first proof-of-concept I’m building is dead-simple accounting for people who can’t justify $20/month for QuickBooks. “I bought a $300 device, add it to the books so it’s ready at tax time,” said to your agent, recorded in a database you own. Boring on purpose. The boring stuff is where regular people actually bleed money to middlemen.