Summary

Armin Ronacher announces that Mario Zechner, creator of the Pi coding agent, is joining his company Earendil. He reflects on how 2025 changed his thinking about software and AI, leading him to prioritize quality and thoughtfulness over speed. Ronacher describes his company's product Lefos as an attempt to build AI that helps people communicate with more care rather than simply optimizing for throughput. He argues that AI systems risk producing 'low-grade degradation everywhere at once' if built without intentionality. The post frames Mario's joining as a convergence of shared values: that quality, design, and trust matter more than hype. Pi will continue as open, extensible software under Earendil's stewardship.

Key Insight

The most important question about AI is not whether it can be useful, but whether we will use it to build software that makes people more thoughtful and human rather than accelerating the production of slop.

Spicy Quotes (click to share)

• 5

  It has become clear to me that it's not a question of whether AI systems can be useful but what kind of software and human-machine interactions we want to bring into the world with them.

• 7

  He does not confuse velocity with progress.

• 7

  These systems are not only exciting, they are also capable of producing a great deal of damage. Sometimes that damage is obvious; sometimes it looks like low-grade degradation everywhere at once.

• 8

  More slop, more noise, more disingenuous emails in my inbox. There is a version of this future that makes people more distracted, more alienated, and less careful with one another.

• 6

  That is not a future I want to help build.

• 5

  Good software should not aim to optimize every minute of your life, but should create room for better and more joyful experiences, better relationships, and better ways of relating to one another.

• 7

  If all we do is use these systems to accelerate the production of slop, we will have missed the opportunity entirely.

• 5

  Quality matters, design matters, and trust is earned through care rather than captured through hype.

Tone

reflective, earnest, opinionated