#18: Rewriting TENEX

"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."