theturtletalks

Just because text isn't the best interface for agentic commerce doesn't mean agentic commerce is dead. The way I'm building my open-source marketplace[0], each store's storefront and cart are rendered right in the chat through MCP UI. So you can ask the agent to change something in your cart or add something, but you also have a real cart in the UI that you can tap and edit directly.

0. https://github.com/openshiporg/marketplace

That case was so baffling, it left me forever doubting German companies, especially ones that ask for my passport. A lot of businesses used WireCard, even the government itself.

Look into the WireCard scandal. WireCard was the Stripe of EU worth billions. They were even audited by one of the big 4 firms and they confirmed it was a real company.

Turns out it was a front for Russian intelligence. Even after the German government found out, the guy still somehow escaped to Russia. There’s a solid chance that Russia operatives have infiltrated the German government. They was even a big hack Russia’s state hackers did and a lot of information was leaked.

I bring this up because Hetzner was asking for my passport to buy a $10/m server. Simple opsec says to just pay a bit more and use DigitalOcean or some other VPS.

Not if you reach for something open-source and use that as the starting point. Most B2B customers are small businesses and once they build bespoke software that works with their business, they won’t need loads of tokens to keep it running.

Have you built something you actually use? The feedback loop is immediate. You tell Claude and it goes it and fixes it.

You realize mostly proprietary software is made by people that haven’t even worked in that niche? Now people in that niche with these immediate loop can make software work way better and faster. Without the risk of it getting worse over time or selling out it a PE firm like Bending Spoons.

Sure

fx0

https://github.com/vercel-labs/fx0

It’s by Vercel Labs, but it’s a small team and it’s basically a small website builder and even comes with 5 free prompts. I’m building on it to build a universal storefront

Moss Keeper

https://github.com/ChetasLua/moss-keeper

Someone who got early access to Fable 5.5 asked it to make an anime style video using html and it’s amazing. I might make a short film doing this one day.

Money Shot

https://github.com/SocialAcolyte/monet-shot

A sort of screen studio alternative with a twist

MailCheap

https://github.com/marclou/mailcheap

Opensource alternative to BeeHiv

These are my latest stats on Github: https://github.com/junaid33?tab=stars

Suit yourself. Always diamonds in the rough and you can check repos I star on Github.

I built software to manage my own e-commerce business before AI coding existed but see teenagers I mentor vibe code applications that are actually helping them make money. They are 5-7 years ahead of where I was at their age and I started the e-commerce business in college.

And these people are making software for themselves and opensourcing it. So what are you on about peers resolving problems?

It’s definitely the best version. I’m seeing so many amazing open source projects since people who once had the vision, but not the coding chops, can now build what they imagine. I myself am building a personal OS that connects to everything and it’s way more fun to build things and use them yourself vs just paying for some other software. Especially when that software can be enshittified or start to squeeze its users like you mentioned.

Everything will be enshittified, it’s not a question of if but when. The incentives are simple, the stock ticker must go up.

I was just watching a video about this. They had this survey question for AI researchers asking when they think AI would take their job. The reason they asked this was that would be the point where AI starts recursive self improvement. If it’s able to replace the job of an AI researcher, then it could keep improving itself.

I actually started building the open-source Shopify version because it was being enshittified. They were making store owners jump thru hoops to use their custom apps. It’s my store, my custom app, why would I need to register with Shopify.

Ask the vape companies that were on Shopify for nearly a decade and Shopify kicked them off a couple months back. I bet they wish they went with open-source instead of blindly trusting a company to whom you are expendable.

Now that is insightful! The demo definitely fooled me and even the first repo requires you to train the model.

Lip reading AI would be pretty big since privacy would probably go out the window.

Someone built an open-source version of this, but it’s far from polished:

https://github.com/joeblau/subvox

There was this really interesting one where it reads your lips:

https://github.com/amywork777/lipflow

I’m using these to build my own so I can work in co-working spaces, planes, and libraries. Though moving my mouth with no words might draw some eyes.

I was also referencing that using commercial software usually brings features you probably don’t use. Those features probably require new NPM packages so by building a bespoke software, you only build features you need.

What are you even implying here? I use it in production for my e-commerce businesses and it was easy to move off Shopify once you have an OMS.

LLMs are solving millennium problems, but can’t make CRUD SaaS alternatives? Listen to yourself man. Claude and ChatGPT used their own AI to build trillion dollar companies. But it making a e-commerce SaaS is a bridge too far huh?

Openship is copy left, Openfronts are all MIT. Some are missing the license since they are not launched. Openship will move to MIT in the near future as well.

That was Tailscale SSH and it’s not on by default

We have cloud hosting too. But users always have the option to self host. Our long term goal is a decentralized, interoperable marketplace powered by this software:

https://marketplace.openship.org/ethos

The biggest case for building bespoke software is that you drop your attack surface area and it’s not as lucrative to hack one person. Don’t even expose it to the internet if you don’t need to and just run Tailscale.

Eh ok, already have people using these in production. I’m having an AI agent run a full e-commerce business using Openfront and Openship.

It’s completely open-source and it’s our mission to make sure these are always 1-click deployable to PaaS like Vercel and Railway.

We also are not like other opensource that depend on external services like Clerk, Resend, other external SaaS. All you need to deploy Openfront and Openship is Node and Postgres.

And the stack is completely agent-first. Next.js, Tailwind, GraphQL powered by Prisma and Keystone.js. Openfront is meant to be taken and adapted by each business. Like if your barbershop wants to sell merch, you can tell your agent to bring in features from e-commerce to the barbershop. We believe this is the future versus SaaS now, where you have to go into settings and configure everything. The future is changing the SaaS at the code level with an agent that has access to the code, deployment, etc.

Openship is an order management system. I built that first when I used Shopify. Then it was easy to build my own which became Openfront. Think of Openship as a the glue between Openfronts so businesses can buy from other businesses.

Happy to answer more questions. We’re making open source alternatives to Shopify, Toast, GlossGenius, MindBody, Booksy, Cloudbeds, Dutchie, etc.

I’m already building this:

https://openship.org

I built the e-commerce[0] and restaurant[1] ones by guiding AI heavily but now have a software factory building the rest[2].

0. https://e-commerce.openship.org

1. https://restaurant.openship.org

2. https://{{gym, hotel, grocery, rental, pharmacy, coffee-shop, etc}}.openship.org

Ah yes the government was putting teacher SSNs on the html client-side. Someone inspected element and found them and reported it. The governor went on a personal vendetta and tried to get him charged with CFAA violations which are no joke.

Made me realize we need way more coders in congress that understand basic technology. Especially with AI becoming a big part of society.

Yes but now that cookie cutter software can be the starting point. I’m not saying to build it from scratch. There’s probably an open source alternatives to the software you are trying to replace. Use that directly or tell AI to clone it and build it in a stack you understand.

Before AI, the businesses that used Zapier and automation were able to pull ahead of businesses that were still doing things manually. A business that has a custom built software with an agent that can change it on the go will provide even a greater advantage.

I’m building the same but with a malleable SaaS. Basically when you sign up, you get the software deployed and an agent that can control that deployment and code.

But the process is slow. The user wants to add a feature to their app so they ask the AI. The AI has access to a terminal where it can clone, fix, and push. This takes time and isn’t instant.

Once AI can abstract this part, software will change forever. It’s what this post alludes to, does code, PR, etc need to reinvented for this?

Once so, no one would ever use cookie cutter software because you could build your own and maintain it using just an agent.

This is extraordinary reverse engineering. I particularly liked the part about using their own signer but outside of the apk. LLMs have effectively taken the Ads moat for so many of these companies. I can just have an AI rebuild their website to a UI I like using this reverse engineered mobile API.

Just like r/math banning the huge math release by OpenAI. Reddit’s shunning of AI has rendered it useless. I used to find so many projects on Reddit and now, it’s less and less.

X has somehow became the best place to find interesting open-source projects people are building.

I'm building an open-source Shopify for every vertical and built a software factory to do it. I envisioned this before LLMs, but LLMs are finally making it possible!

For most businesses, it’s going to be business as usual. By the time businesses see the benefits of AI, their competitors that actually leveraged AI will have pulled too far ahead.

If the original company has distribution, they can likely catch up, but the gap we see between AI-first companies and the companies not utilizing AI will broaden exponentially in the coming years.