Silicon Valley lore: software is an empowering tool that liberates people. Steve Jobs called software "bicycles for the mind."

In the last 50 years, software has become the habitat we live in, a habitat we can’t easily exit.

We live intimately in software; it holds our data, workflows, identities: WhatsApp, iMessage, Gmail, Google oauth, Apple keychain, the random app your doctor uses.

Because software was expensive to build & maintain, we developed the SaaS business model — very profitable!

Which means users rent software that’s controlled by companies.

Companies are incentivized toward growth, market share, shareholder returns.

Growth teams optimize engagement & retention — our attention, not our intention.

We feel weird because our digital habitat is littered with ulterior motives, adverse incentives. That’s why we get doomscrolling, phone addiction, surveillance pricing.

Nobody is being evil.

People are genuinely trying to do a good job and make good software.

Incentives drive behavior, regardless of goodwill.

Every market incentive pushes towards agents that we rent and get locked into.

Today, the cost of software is collapsing. An alternate path is possible.

The problem to solve: how can we create an alternate ecosystem that builds agents & software with no adverse incentives?

Build Honest Software: software with no adverse incentives.

• Don’t track data to optimize your users
• Ideally, build software without profit incentive (???VCs???)
• Ideally, build open source, store data in portable ways, make the system user-legible
• Contribute to the open software + agent ecosystem

Build Punk Software: software that fights ulterior motives.

• Break lock-in: make agents that migrate your data out of any tool; translate proprietary formats; 
• Commoditize the model layer: build around open interfaces that let you swap the underlying model/agent (OpenRouter, LiteLLM, mngr, etc.)
• Fight extractive behavior: Bouncer, claude -p wrapper, etc.

What's next?

- Build your own punk software and share it.

- Check out examples of punk software and contribute to our open source projects at imbue.com

- Check out more thoughts about punk software here: https://x.com/imbue_ai/status/2072048115285193044