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Four hun­dred in­quiries from American farm­ers poured in af­ter a sin­gle in­ter­view. Not for a John Deere. Not for a Case IH. For a trac­tor built in Alberta with a re­man­u­fac­tured 1990s diesel en­gine and zero elec­tron­ics.

Ursa Ag, a small Canadian man­u­fac­turer, is as­sem­bling trac­tors pow­ered by 12-valve Cummins en­gines — the same me­chan­i­cally in­jected work­horses that pow­ered com­bines and pickup trucks decades ago — and sell­ing them for roughly half the price of com­pa­ra­ble ma­chines from es­tab­lished brands. The 150-horsepower model starts at $129,900 CAD, about $95,000 USD. The range-top­ping 260-hp ver­sion runs $199,900 CAD, around $146,000.

Try find­ing a sim­i­larly pow­ered John Deere for that money.

Owner Doug Wilson is­n’t pre­tend­ing this is cut­ting-edge tech­nol­ogy. That’s the en­tire point. The 150-hp and 180-hp mod­els use re­man­u­fac­tured 5.9-liter Cummins en­gines, while the 260-hp gets an 8.3-liter unit.

All are fed by Bosch P-pumps — purely me­chan­i­cal fuel in­jec­tion, no ECU, no pro­pri­etary soft­ware hand­shake re­quired. The cabs are sourced ex­ter­nally and stripped to es­sen­tials: an air ride seat, me­chan­i­cally con­nected con­trols, and noth­ing re­sem­bling a touch­screen.

This plays di­rectly into a fight that has been sim­mer­ing for years. John Deere’s right-to-re­pair bat­tles be­came a na­tional story when farm­ers dis­cov­ered they could­n’t fix their own equip­ment with­out dealer-au­tho­rized soft­ware. Lawsuits fol­lowed, then leg­is­la­tion.

Deere even­tu­ally made con­ces­sions, but the dam­age was done. A gen­er­a­tion of farm­ers learned ex­actly how much con­trol they’d sur­ren­dered by buy­ing ma­chines loaded with pro­pri­etary code.

Wilson saw the gap and drove a trac­tor through it. The 12-valve Cummins is ar­guably the most widely un­der­stood diesel en­gine in North America. Every in­de­pen­dent shop, every shade-tree me­chanic with a set of wrenches, every farmer who grew up turn­ing bolts has en­coun­tered one.

Parts sit on shelves in thou­sands of stores. Downtime — the thing that ac­tu­ally costs a farmer money dur­ing plant­ing or har­vest — shrinks dra­mat­i­cally when you don’t need a fac­tory tech­ni­cian with a lap­top to di­ag­nose a fuel de­liv­ery prob­lem.

Ursa Ag’s dealer net­work re­mains tiny, and the com­pany sells di­rect. Wilson ad­mit­ted they haven’t scaled up dis­tri­b­u­tion be­cause they can’t keep shelves stocked as it stands. He says 2026 pro­duc­tion will ex­ceed the com­pa­ny’s en­tire cu­mu­la­tive out­put, which is a bold claim from a small op­er­a­tion, and whether they can ac­tu­ally de­liver is the sin­gle biggest ques­tion hang­ing over this story.

The U.S. mar­ket is where things get in­ter­est­ing. Ursa Ag has no American dis­trib­u­tors yet, though Wilson says that’s likely to change. The eas­i­est an­swer is yes, we can ship to the United States,” he told re­porters.

Those 400 American in­quiries af­ter one Farms.com seg­ment sug­gest the ap­petite is real. Farmers who have been buy­ing 30-year-old equip­ment to avoid mod­ern com­plex­ity now have a new al­ter­na­tive — a ma­chine with fresh sheet metal, a war­ranty, and an en­gine phi­los­o­phy rooted firmly in the past.

There’s a rea­son the used trac­tor mar­ket has been so ro­bust. Plenty of op­er­a­tors looked at a $300,000 ma­chine full of sen­sors and soft­ware and de­cided a well-main­tained older unit was the smarter bet. Ursa Ag is man­u­fac­tur­ing that bet from scratch.

Whether a small Alberta com­pany can scale fast enough to meet de­mand from an en­tire con­ti­nent is an­other mat­ter. The big man­u­fac­tur­ers have sup­ply chains, dealer net­works, and fi­nanc­ing arms that took decades to build. Wilson has re­man­u­fac­tured Cummins en­gines and a value propo­si­tion that res­onates with any­one who has ever waited three days for a dealer tech to show up with a di­ag­nos­tic ca­ble.

The farm equip­ment in­dus­try spent 20 years adding com­plex­ity and cost. Ursa Ag is wa­ger­ing that a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of farm­ers never wanted any of it.

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🚀 DeepSeek-V4 Preview is of­fi­cially live & open-sourced! Welcome to the era of cost-ef­fec­tive 1M con­text length.

🔹 DeepSeek-V4-Pro: 1.6T to­tal / 49B ac­tive params. Performance ri­val­ing the world’s top closed-source mod­els.

🔹 DeepSeek-V4-Flash: 284B to­tal / 13B ac­tive params. Your fast, ef­fi­cient, and eco­nom­i­cal choice.

Try it now at chat.deepseek.com via Expert Mode / Instant Mode. API is up­dated & avail­able to­day!

📄 Tech Report: https://​hug­ging­face.co/​deepseek-ai/​DeepSeek-V4-Pro/​blob/​main/​DeepSeek_V4.pdf

🤗 Open Weights: https://​hug­ging­face.co/​col­lec­tions/​deepseek-ai/​deepseek-v4

DeepSeek-V4-Pro​

🔹 Enhanced Agentic Capabilities: Open-source SOTA in Agentic Coding bench­marks.

🔹 Rich World Knowledge: Leads all cur­rent open mod­els, trail­ing only Gemini-3.1-Pro.

🔹 World-Class Reasoning: Beats all cur­rent open mod­els in Math/STEM/Coding, ri­val­ing top closed-source mod­els.

DeepSeek-V4-Flash​

🔹 Reasoning ca­pa­bil­i­ties closely ap­proach V4-Pro.

🔹 Performs on par with V4-Pro on sim­ple Agent tasks.

🔹 Smaller pa­ra­me­ter size, faster re­sponse times, and highly cost-ef­fec­tive API pric­ing.

Structural Innovation & Ultra-High Context Efficiency​

🔹 Novel Attention: Token-wise com­pres­sion + DSA (DeepSeek Sparse Attention).

🔹 Peak Efficiency: World-leading long con­text with dras­ti­cally re­duced com­pute & mem­ory costs.

🔹 1M Standard: 1M con­text is now the de­fault across all of­fi­cial DeepSeek ser­vices.

Dedicated Optimizations for Agent Capabilities​

🔹 DeepSeek-V4 is seam­lessly in­te­grated with lead­ing AI agents like Claude Code, OpenClaw & OpenCode.

🔹 Already dri­ving our in-house agen­tic cod­ing at DeepSeek.

The fig­ure be­low show­cases a sam­ple PDF gen­er­ated by DeepSeek-V4-Pro.

API is Available Today!​

🔹 Keep base_url, just up­date model to deepseek-v4-pro or deepseek-v4-flash.

🔹 Supports OpenAI ChatCompletions & Anthropic APIs.

🔹 Both mod­els sup­port 1M con­text & dual modes (Thinking / Non-Thinking): https://​api-docs.deepseek.com/​guides/​think­ing_­mode

⚠️ Note: deepseek-chat & deepseek-rea­soner will be fully re­tired and in­ac­ces­si­ble af­ter Jul 24th, 2026, 15:59 (UTC Time). (Currently rout­ing to deepseek-v4-flash non-think­ing/​think­ing).

🔹 Amid re­cent at­ten­tion, a quick re­minder: please rely only on our of­fi­cial ac­counts for DeepSeek news. Statements from other chan­nels do not re­flect our views.

🔹 Thank you for your con­tin­ued trust. We re­main com­mit­ted to longter­mism, ad­vanc­ing steadily to­ward our ul­ti­mate goal of AGI.

Writing this makes me ir­ra­tionally sad, but Ghostty will be leav­ing GitHub1.

I’m GitHub user 1299, joined Feb 2008.

Since then, I’ve opened GitHub every sin­gle day. Every day, mul­ti­ple times per

day, for over 18 years. Over half my life. A hand­ful of ex­cep­tions in there

(I’d love to see the data), but I can’t imag­ine more than a week per year.

GitHub is the place that has made me the most happy. I al­ways made time for

it. When I went through tough breakups? I lost my­self in open source… on

GitHub. During col­lege at 4 AM when every­one is passed out? Let me get one

com­mit in. During my hon­ey­moon while my wife is still asleep? Yeah, GitHub.

It’s where I’ve his­tor­i­cally been hap­pi­est and wanted to be.

Even the an­noy­ing stuff! Some peo­ple doom scroll so­cial me­dia. I’ve been doom

scrolling GitHub is­sues since be­fore that was a word. On va­ca­tions I’d have

book­marks of dif­fer­ent pro­jects on GitHub I wanted to study. Not just source

code, but OSS processes, how other main­tain­ers re­act to dif­fi­cult sit­u­a­tions.

Etc. Believe it or not, I like this.

Some might call this sick, but my hobby and work and pas­sion all align and for

most of my life they got to also live in one place on the in­ter­net: GitHub.

Did you know I started Vagrant (my first suc­cess­ful open source pro­ject) in

large part be­cause I hoped it would get me a job at GitHub? It’s no se­cret,

I’ve said this re­peat­edly, and in my first pub­lic talk about Vagrant, when I

was a mere 20 years old, I joked “maybe GitHub will hire me if it’s good!”

GitHub was my dream job. I did­n’t ever get to work there (not their fault).

But it was the per­fect place I wanted to be. The en­gi­neers were in­cred­i­ble,

the prod­uct was in­cred­i­ble, and it was some­thing I lived and breathed every

day. I still do and con­sis­tently have… for these 18 years. Enough time for

an en­tire hu­man to be­come an adult, all on GitHub.

Lately, I’ve been very pub­licly crit­i­cal of GitHub. I’ve been mean about it.

I’ve been an­gry about it. I’ve hurt peo­ple’s feel­ings. I’ve been lash­ing out.

Because GitHub is fail­ing me, every sin­gle day, and it is per­sonal. It is

ir­ra­tionally per­sonal. I love GitHub more than a per­son should love a thing,

and I’m mad at it. I’m sorry about the hurt feel­ings to the peo­ple work­ing on

it.

I’ve felt this way for a long time, but for the past month I’ve kept a jour­nal

where I put an “X” next to every date where a GitHub out­age has neg­a­tively

im­pacted my abil­ity to work2. Almost every day has an X. On the day I am

writ­ing this post, I’ve been un­able to do any PR re­view for ~2 hours be­cause

there is a GitHub Actions out­age3. This is no longer a place for se­ri­ous

work if it just blocks you out for hours per day, every day.

It’s not a fun place for me to be any­more. I want to be there but it does­n’t

want me to be there. I want to get work done and it does­n’t want me to get

work done. I want to ship soft­ware and it does­n’t want me to ship soft­ware.

I want it to be bet­ter, but I also want to code. And I can’t code with GitHub

any­more. I’m sorry. After 18 years, I’ve got to go. I’d love to come back one

day, but this will have to be pred­i­cated on real re­sults and im­prove­ments,

not words and promises.

I’ll share more de­tails about where the Ghostty pro­ject will be mov­ing to in

the com­ing months. We have a plan but I’m also very much still in dis­cus­sions

with mul­ti­ple providers (both com­mer­cial and FOSS).

It’ll take us time to re­move all of our de­pen­den­cies on GitHub and we have a

plan in place to do it as in­cre­men­tally as pos­si­ble. We plan on keep­ing a

read-only mir­ror avail­able on GitHub at the cur­rent URL.

My per­sonal pro­jects and other work will re­main on GitHub for now.

Ghostty is where I, our main­tain­ers, and our open source com­mu­nity are

most im­pacted so that is the fo­cus of this change. We’ll see where it

goes af­ter that.

Footnotes

The tim­ing of this is co­in­ci­den­tal with the large out­age on April 27, 2026.

We’ve been dis­cussing and putting to­gether a plan to leave GitHub

for months, and this blog post was writ­ten over a week ago. We only

made the fi­nal de­ci­sion this week. ↩

The tim­ing of this is co­in­ci­den­tal with the large out­age on April 27, 2026.

We’ve been dis­cussing and putting to­gether a plan to leave GitHub

for months, and this blog post was writ­ten over a week ago. We only

made the fi­nal de­ci­sion this week. ↩

To the “Git is dis­trib­uted!” crowd: the is­sue is­n’t Git, it’s the

in­fra­struc­ture we rely on around it: is­sues, PRs, Actions, etc. ↩

To the “Git is dis­trib­uted!” crowd: the is­sue is­n’t Git, it’s the

in­fra­struc­ture we rely on around it: is­sues, PRs, Actions, etc. ↩

This is not the large Elasticsearch out­age they had on April 27, 2026.

This blog post was writ­ten a week be­fore that, so this was a dif­fer­ent

out­age. ↩

This is not the large Elasticsearch out­age they had on April 27, 2026.

This blog post was writ­ten a week be­fore that, so this was a dif­fer­ent

out­age. ↩

The DeepSeek API uses an API for­mat com­pat­i­ble with OpenAI/Anthropic. By mod­i­fy­ing the con­fig­u­ra­tion, you can use the OpenAI/Anthropic SDK or soft­wares com­pat­i­ble with the OpenAI/Anthropic API to ac­cess the DeepSeek API.

* The model names deepseek-chat and deepseek-rea­soner will be dep­re­cated on 2026/07/24. For com­pat­i­bil­ity, they cor­re­spond to the non-think­ing mode and think­ing mode of deepseek-v4-flash, re­spec­tively.

Invoke The Chat API​

Once you have ob­tained an API key, you can ac­cess the DeepSeek model us­ing the fol­low­ing ex­am­ple scripts in the OpenAI API for­mat. This is a non-stream ex­am­ple, you can set the stream pa­ra­me­ter to true to get stream re­sponse.

For ex­am­ples us­ing the Anthropic API for­mat, please re­fer to Anthropic API.

curl

python

nodejs

curl https://​api.deepseek.com/​chat/​com­ple­tions \ -H “Content-Type: ap­pli­ca­tion/​json” \ -H “Authorization: Bearer ${DEEPSEEK_API_KEY}” \ -d ‘{ “model”: “deepseek-v4-pro”, “messages”: [ {“role”: “system”, “content”: “You are a help­ful as­sis­tant.“}, {“role”: “user”, “content”: “Hello!“} ], “thinking”: {“type”: “enabled”}, “reasoning_effort”: “high”, “stream”: false }’

We’re check­ing if you’re a real per­son and not an au­to­mated bad bot. Usually, the captcha be­low will com­plete it­self. If it does­n’t, sim­ply click the check­box in the captcha to ver­ify. Once ver­i­fied, you’ll be taken to the page you wanted to visit.

If for some rea­son af­ter ver­i­fy­ing the captcha above, you are con­stantly be­ing redi­rected to this ex­act same page to re-ver­ify the captcha again, then please click on the but­ton be­low to get in touch with the sup­port team.

A col­lec­tion of prin­ci­ples and pat­terns that shape soft­ware sys­tems, teams, and de­ci­sions.

56 laws

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In 2023, Raytheon’s pres­i­dent stood at the Paris Air Show and de­scribed what it took to restart Stinger mis­sile pro­duc­tion. They brought back en­gi­neers in their 70s to teach younger work­ers how to build a mis­sile from pa­per schemat­ics drawn dur­ing the Carter ad­min­is­tra­tion. Test equip­ment had been sit­ting in ware­houses for years. The nose cone still had to be at­tached by hand, ex­actly as it was forty years ago.

The Pentagon had­n’t bought a new Stinger in twenty years. Then Russia in­vaded Ukraine, and sud­denly every­one needed them. The pro­duc­tion line was shut down. The elec­tron­ics were ob­so­lete. The seeker com­po­nent was out of pro­duc­tion. An or­der placed in May 2022 would­n’t de­liver un­til 2026. Four years. Not be­cause of money. Because the peo­ple who knew how to build them re­tired a decade ear­lier and no­body re­placed them.

I run en­gi­neer­ing teams in Ukraine. My peo­ple lived the other side of this equa­tion. Not the fac­tory floor. The re­ceiv­ing end. While Raytheon was strug­gling to restart pro­duc­tion from forty-year-old blue­prints, the US was ship­ping thou­sands of Stingers to Ukraine. RTX CEO Greg Hayes: ten months of war burned through thir­teen years’ worth of Stinger pro­duc­tion. I’ve seen this pat­tern be­fore. It’s hap­pen­ing in my in­dus­try right now.

In March 2023, the EU promised Ukraine one mil­lion ar­tillery shells within twelve months. European pro­duc­tion ca­pac­ity sat at 230,000 shells per year. Ukraine was con­sum­ing 5,000 to 7,000 rounds per day. Anyone with a cal­cu­la­tor could see this would­n’t work.

By the dead­line, Europe de­liv­ered about half. Macron called the orig­i­nal promise reck­less. An in­ves­ti­ga­tion by eleven me­dia out­lets across nine coun­tries found ac­tual pro­duc­tion ca­pac­ity was roughly one-third of of­fi­cial EU claims. The mil­lion-shell mark was­n’t hit un­til December 2024, nine months late.

It was­n’t one bot­tle­neck. It was all of them. France had halted do­mes­tic pro­pel­lant pro­duc­tion in 2007. Seventeen years of noth­ing. Europe’s sin­gle ma­jor TNT pro­ducer was in Poland. Germany had two days of am­mu­ni­tion stored. A Nammo plant in Denmark was shut down in 2020 and had to be restarted from scratch. The en­tire con­ti­nen­t’s de­fense in­dus­try had been op­ti­mized for mak­ing small batches of ex­pen­sive cus­tom prod­ucts. Nobody planned for vol­ume. Nobody planned for cri­sis.

The U.S. was­n’t much bet­ter. One plant in Scranton, one fa­cil­ity in Iowa for ex­plo­sive fill, no do­mes­tic TNT pro­duc­tion since 1986. Billions of in­vest­ment later, pro­duc­tion still had­n’t hit half the tar­get.

This was­n’t an ac­ci­dent. In 1993, the Pentagon told de­fense CEOs to con­sol­i­date or die. Fifty-one ma­jor de­fense con­trac­tors col­lapsed into five. Tactical mis­sile sup­pli­ers went from thir­teen to three. Shipbuilders from eight to two. The work­force fell from 3.2 mil­lion to 1.1 mil­lion. A 65% cut.

The am­mu­ni­tion sup­ply chain had sin­gle points of fail­ure every­where. One man­u­fac­turer for 155mm shell cas­ings, sit­ting in Coachella, California, on the San Andreas Fault. One fa­cil­ity in Canada for pro­pel­lant charges. Optimized for min­i­mum cost with zero mar­gin for surge. On pa­per, ef­fi­cient. In prac­tice, one bad day away from col­lapse.

Then there’s Fogbank. A clas­si­fied ma­te­r­ial used in nu­clear war­heads. Produced from 1975 to 1989, then the fa­cil­ity was shut down. When the gov­ern­ment needed to re­pro­duce it for a war­head life ex­ten­sion pro­gram, they dis­cov­ered they could­n’t. A GAO re­port found that al­most all staff with pro­duc­tion ex­per­tise had re­tired, died, or left the agency. Few records ex­isted.

After $69 mil­lion in cost over­runs and years of failed at­tempts, they fi­nally pro­duced vi­able Fogbank. Then dis­cov­ered the new batch was too pure. The orig­i­nal process had re­lied on an un­in­ten­tional im­pu­rity that was crit­i­cal to the ma­te­ri­al’s func­tion. Nobody knew. Not the en­gi­neers try­ing to re­pro­duce it. Not even the orig­i­nal work­ers who made it decades ear­lier. Los Alamos called it an un­know­ing de­pen­dency in the orig­i­nal process.

A nu­clear weapons pro­gram lost the abil­ity to make a ma­te­r­ial it in­vented. The knowl­edge did­n’t just leave with peo­ple. It was never fully un­der­stood by any­one.

(Correction: the orig­i­nal ver­sion stated that the work­ers who made Fogbank knew about the im­pu­rity. They did­n’t. The de­pen­dency was un­wit­ting, which makes the knowl­edge-loss ar­gu­ment stronger, not weaker. Thanks to John F. in the com­ments for catch­ing this.)

I read the Fogbank story and rec­og­nized it im­me­di­ately. Not the nu­clear ma­te­r­ial. The pat­tern. Build ca­pa­bil­ity over decades. Find a cheaper sub­sti­tute. Let the hu­man pipeline at­ro­phy. Enjoy the sav­ings. Then watch it all col­lapse when a cri­sis de­mands what you op­ti­mized away.

In de­fense, the sub­sti­tute was the peace div­i­dend. In soft­ware, it’s AI.

I wrote about the tal­ent pipeline col­lapse be­fore. The hir­ing num­bers and the ju­nior-to-se­nior prob­lem are doc­u­mented. So is the com­pre­hen­sion cri­sis. What I did­n’t have was the right his­tor­i­cal par­al­lel. Now I do.

And it tells you some­thing the hir­ing data does­n’t: how long re­build­ing ac­tu­ally takes.

Every ma­jor de­fense pro­duc­tion ramp-up took three to five years for sim­ple sys­tems. Five to ten for com­plex ones. Stinger: thirty months min­i­mum from or­der to de­liv­ery. Javelin: four and a half years to less than dou­ble pro­duc­tion. 155mm shells: four years and still not at tar­get de­spite five bil­lion dol­lars in­vested. France only restarted pro­pel­lant pro­duc­tion in 2024, sev­en­teen years af­ter shut­ting it down.

Money was never the con­straint. Knowledge was. RAND found that 10% of tech­ni­cal skills for sub­ma­rine de­sign need ten years of on-the-job ex­pe­ri­ence to de­velop, some­times fol­low­ing a PhD. Apprenticeships in de­fense trades take two to four years, with five to eight years to reach su­per­vi­sory com­pe­tence.

Now map that onto soft­ware. A ju­nior de­vel­oper needs three to five years to be­come a com­pe­tent mid-level en­gi­neer. Five to eight years to be­come se­nior. Ten or more to be­come a prin­ci­pal or ar­chi­tect. That time­line can’t be com­pressed by throw­ing money at it. It can’t be com­pressed by AI ei­ther.

A METR ran­dom­ized con­trolled trial found that ex­pe­ri­enced de­vel­op­ers us­ing AI cod­ing tools ac­tu­ally took 19% longer on real-world open source tasks. Before start­ing, they pre­dicted AI would make them 24% faster. The gap be­tween pre­dic­tion and re­al­ity was 43 per­cent­age points. When re­searchers tried to run a fol­low-up, a sig­nif­i­cant share of de­vel­op­ers re­fused to par­tic­i­pate if it meant work­ing with­out AI. They could­n’t imag­ine go­ing back.

The soft­ware in­dus­try is in year three of the same op­ti­miza­tion. Salesforce said it won’t hire more soft­ware en­gi­neers in 2025. A LeadDev sur­vey found 54% of en­gi­neer­ing lead­ers be­lieve AI copi­lots will re­duce ju­nior hir­ing long-term. A CRA sur­vey of uni­ver­sity com­put­ing de­part­ments found 62% re­ported de­clin­ing en­roll­ment this year.

I see it in code re­view. Review is now the bot­tle­neck. AI gen­er­ates code fast. Humans re­view it slow. The in­dus­try’s an­swer is pre­dictable: let AI re­view AI’s code. I’m not do­ing that. I’ve re­worked our pull re­quest tem­plates in­stead. Every PR now has to ex­plain what changed, why, what type of change it is, screen­shots of be­fore and af­ter. Structured con­text so the re­viewer is­n’t guess­ing. I’m adding ded­i­cated re­view­ers per pro­ject. More eyes, more chances to catch what the model missed.

But even that does­n’t solve the deeper prob­lem. The skills you need to be ef­fec­tive now are dif­fer­ent. Technical ex­per­tise alone is­n’t enough any­more. You need peo­ple who can take own­er­ship, com­mu­ni­cate trade­offs, push back on bad sug­ges­tions from a ma­chine that sounds very con­fi­dent. Leadership qual­i­ties. Our last hir­ing round tells you how rare that is: 2,253 can­di­dates, 2,069 dis­qual­i­fied, 4 hired. A 0.18% con­ver­sion rate. The com­bi­na­tion of tech­ni­cal skill and the judg­ment to know when the AI is wrong barely ex­ists in the mar­ket any­more.

We doc­u­ment every­thing. Site Books, SDDs, RVS re­ports, boil­er­plate mod­ules with full cov­er­age. It works to­day, be­cause the peo­ple read­ing those docs have the en­gi­neer­ing ex­per­tise to act on them. What hap­pens when they don’t? Honestly, I don’t know. Maybe AI in five years is good enough that it won’t mat­ter. Maybe the prob­lem stays man­age­able. I can’t pre­dict the ca­pa­bil­i­ties of mod­els in 2031.

But crises don’t send cal­en­dar in­vites. Nobody ex­pected a full-scale land war in Europe in 2022. The de­fense in­dus­try had thirty years to pre­pare and did­n’t. Even Fogbank had records. There weren’t enough. The orig­i­nal work­ers did­n’t fully un­der­stand their own process.

Five to ten years from now, we’ll need se­nior en­gi­neers. People who un­der­stand sys­tems end to end, who can de­bug dis­trib­uted fail­ures at 2 AM, who carry in­sti­tu­tional knowl­edge that ex­ists nowhere in the code­base. Those en­gi­neers don’t ex­ist yet be­cause we’re not cre­at­ing them. The ju­niors who should be learn­ing right now are ei­ther not be­ing hired or de­vel­op­ing what a DoD-funded work­force study calls “AI-mediated com­pe­tence.” They can prompt an AI. They can’t tell you what the AI got wrong.

It’s Fogbank for code. When ju­niors skip de­bug­ging and skip the for­ma­tive mis­takes, they don’t build the tacit ex­per­tise. And when my gen­er­a­tion of en­gi­neers re­tires, that knowl­edge does­n’t trans­fer to the AI.

It just dis­ap­pears.

The West al­ready made this mis­take once. The bill came due in Ukraine.

I know how this sounds. I know I’ve writ­ten about the tal­ent pipeline be­fore. The de­fense ex­am­ple is­n’t about re­peat­ing the ar­gu­ment. It’s about show­ing what hap­pens if the in­dus­try’s ex­pec­ta­tions don’t work out. Stinger, Javelin, Fogbank, a mil­lion shells no­body could make. That’s the cost of bet­ting wrong on op­ti­miza­tion. We’re mak­ing the same bet with soft­ware en­gi­neer­ing right now.

Maybe AI gets good enough, and the bet pays off. Maybe it does­n’t. The de­fense in­dus­try thought peace would last for­ever, too.

No posts

Your phone is about to stop be­ing yours.

126 days un­til lock­down

Starting September 2026, a silent up­date, non­con­sen­su­ally pushed by Google, will block every Android app whose de­vel­oper has­n’t reg­is­tered with Google, signed their con­tract, paid up, and handed over gov­ern­ment ID.

Every app and every de­vice, world­wide, with no opt-out.

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What Google is do­ing

In August 2025, Google an­nounced a new re­quire­ment: start­ing September 2026, every Android app de­vel­oper must reg­is­ter cen­trally with Google be­fore their soft­ware can be in­stalled on any de­vice. Not just Play Store apps: all apps. This in­cludes apps shared be­tween friends, dis­trib­uted through F-Droid, built by hob­by­ists for per­sonal use. Independent de­vel­op­ers, church and com­mu­nity groups, and hob­by­ists alike will all be frozen out of be­ing able to de­velop and dis­trib­ute their soft­ware.

Registration re­quires:

Paying a fee to Google

Agreeing to Google’s Terms and Conditions

Surrendering your gov­ern­ment-is­sued iden­ti­fi­ca­tion

Providing ev­i­dence of your pri­vate sign­ing key

Listing all cur­rent and all fu­ture ap­pli­ca­tion iden­ti­fiers

If a de­vel­oper does not com­ply, their apps get silently blocked on every Android de­vice world­wide.

Who this hurts

You

You bought an Android phone be­cause Google told you it was open. You could in­stall what you wanted, and that was the deal.

Google is now rewrit­ing that deal, retroac­tively, on hard­ware you al­ready own. After the up­date lands, you can only run soft­ware that Google has pre-ap­proved. On your phone: your prop­erty, that you paid for.

Independent de­vel­op­ers

A teenager’s first app, a vol­un­teer’s pri­vacy tool, or a com­pa­ny’s con­fi­den­tial in­ter­nal beta. It does­n’t mat­ter. After September 2026, none of these can be in­stalled with­out Google’s bless­ing.

F-Droid, home to thou­sands of free and open-source Android apps, has called this an “existential” threat. Cory Doctorow calls it “Darth Android”.

Governments & civil so­ci­ety

Google has a doc­u­mented track record of com­ply­ing when au­thor­i­tar­ian regimes de­mand app re­movals. With this pro­gram, the soft­ware that runs your coun­try’s in­sti­tu­tions will ex­ist at the plea­sure of a sin­gle un­ac­count­able for­eign cor­po­ra­tion.

The EFF calls app gate­keep­ing “an ever-ex­pand­ing path­way to in­ter­net cen­sor­ship.”

Google’s “escape hatch” is a trap door

Google says “power users” can “still in­stall” un­ver­i­fied apps. Here’s what that ac­tu­ally looks like:

Delve into System Settings, find Developer Options

Tap the build num­ber seven times to en­able Developer Mode

Dismiss scare screens about co­er­cion

Enter your PIN

Restart the de­vice

Wait 24 hours

Come back, dis­miss more scare screens

Pick “allow tem­porar­ily” (7 days) or “allow in­def­i­nitely”

Confirm, again, that you un­der­stand “the risks”

Nine steps. A manda­tory 24-hour cool­ing-off pe­riod. For in­stalling soft­ware on a de­vice you own.

Worse: this flow runs en­tirely through Google Play Services, not the Android OS. Google can change it, tighten it, or kill it at any time, with no OS up­date re­quired and no con­sent needed. And as of to­day, it has­n’t shipped in any beta, pre­view, or ca­nary build. It ex­ists only as a blog post and some mock­ups.

This is big­ger than Android

If Google can retroac­tively lock down bil­lions of de­vices that were sold as open plat­forms, every hard­ware man­u­fac­turer on the planet is watch­ing.

The prin­ci­ple be­ing es­tab­lished: the com­pany that made your de­vice gets to de­cide, af­ter you’ve bought it, what soft­ware you’re al­lowed to run. In soft­ware, this is called a “rug pull”; but at least you could al­ways in­stall com­pet­ing soft­ware. In hard­ware, it is a fait ac­com­pli that strips you of your agency and ren­ders you pow­er­less to the whims of a sin­gle un­ac­count­able gate­keeper and con­victed mo­nop­o­list.

Android’s open­ness was never just a fea­ture. It was the promise that dis­tin­guished it from iPhone. Millions chose Android for ex­actly that rea­son. Google is now re­vok­ing that promise uni­lat­er­ally, on de­vices al­ready in peo­ple’s pock­ets, be­cause they’ve de­cided they have enough mar­ket dom­i­nance and reg­u­la­tory cap­ture to get away with it.

Ars Technica: “Google’s Apple envy threat­ens to dis­man­tle Android’s open legacy.”

But wait, is­n’t this…

″…just about se­cu­rity?”

The se­cu­rity ra­tio­nale is a smoke­screen. Google Play Protect al­ready scans for mal­ware in­de­pen­dent of de­vel­oper iden­tity. Requiring a gov­ern­ment ID does­n’t make code safer. It makes de­vel­op­ers iden­ti­fi­able and con­trol­lable. Malware au­thors can reg­is­ter. Indie de­vel­op­ers and dis­si­dents of­ten can’t. The EFF is blunt: iden­tity-based gate­keep­ing is a cen­sor­ship tool, not a se­cu­rity one.

″…still side­load­ing if you use the ad­vanced flow?”

Nine steps, 24-hour wait, buried in Developer Options, de­liv­ered through a pro­pri­etary ser­vice that Google can re­voke when­ever they want. That’s not side­load­ing. That’s a de­ter­rence mech­a­nism built to en­sure al­most no­body com­pletes it. And since it runs through Play Services rather than the OS, Google can tighten or kill it silently.

″…only a prob­lem if you have some­thing to hide?”

Whistleblowers, jour­nal­ists, and ac­tivists un­der au­thor­i­tar­ian gov­ern­ments will be the first vic­tims. People in do­mes­tic abuse sit­u­a­tions are next. All these groups have le­git­i­mate rea­sons to dis­trib­ute or use soft­ware with­out putting their le­gal iden­tity in a Google data­base. Anonymous open-source con­tri­bu­tion is a tra­di­tion older than Google it­self. This pol­icy ends it on Android.

″…the same thing Apple does?”

Apple has been a walled gar­den from day one. People chose Android be­cause it was dif­fer­ent. “Apple does it too” is a race to the bot­tom and a weak tu quoque ar­gu­ment. And un­der reg­u­la­tory pres­sure (the EU’s Digital Markets Act), even Apple is be­ing forced to open up. Google is mov­ing in the op­po­site di­rec­tion: at­tempt­ing to fur­ther en­trench its gate­keep­ing sta­tus.

″…just $25 and some pa­per­work?”

Maybe, if you’re a de­vel­oper in the US with a credit card and a dri­ver’s li­cense. Try be­ing a stu­dent in sub-Sa­ha­ran Africa, or a dis­si­dent in Myanmar, or a vol­un­teer main­tain­ing a com­mu­nity health app. The cost is­n’t only fi­nan­cial: you’re sur­ren­der­ing gov­ern­ment ID and ev­i­dence of your sign­ing keys to a com­pany that rou­tinely com­plies with gov­ern­ment de­mands to re­move apps and ex­pose de­vel­op­ers.

Fight back

Everyone

Install F-Droid on every Android de­vice you own. Alternative stores only sur­vive if peo­ple ac­tu­ally use them.

Contact your reg­u­la­tors. Regulators world­wide are gen­uinely con­cerned about mo­nop­o­lies and the cen­tral­iza­tion of power in the tech sec­tor, and want to hear di­rectly from in­di­vid­u­als who are af­fected and con­cerned.

Share this page. Link to keepan­droidopen.org every­where.

Push back on as­tro­turfers. The “well, ac­tu­ally…” crowd is out in force. Don’t let them set the nar­ra­tive.

Sign the change.org pe­ti­tion and join the over 100,000 sig­na­to­ries who have made their voices heard.

Read and share our open let­ter

Tell Google what you think of this through their own de­vel­oper ver­i­fi­ca­tion sur­vey (for all the good that will do).

Developers

Do not sign up. Don’t join the pro­gram by sign­ing up for the Android Developer Console and agree­ing to their ir­rev­o­ca­ble Terms and Conditions. Don’t ver­ify your iden­tity. Don’t play ball.

Google’s plan only works if de­vel­op­ers com­ply. Don’t.

Talk other de­vel­op­ers and or­ga­ni­za­tions out of sign­ing up.

Add the FreeDroidWarn li­brary to your apps to warn users.

Run a web­site? Add the count­down ban­ner.

Google em­ploy­ees

If you know some­thing about the pro­gram’s tech­ni­cal im­ple­men­ta­tion or in­ter­nal ra­tio­nale, con­tact tips@keepan­droidopen.org from a non-work ma­chine and a non-Gmail ac­count. Strict con­fi­dence guar­an­teed.

All those op­posed…

69 or­ga­ni­za­tions from 21 coun­tries have signed the open let­ter

Read the full open let­ter and thank the sig­na­to­ries →

What they’re say­ing

Tech press

“Google’s Android de­vel­oper ver­i­fi­ca­tion pro­gram draws push­back” InfoWorld

“Google’s Android de­vel­oper ver­i­fi­ca­tion pro­gram draws push­back”

“Google’s New Developer ID Rule Could Harm F-Droid” Reclaim The Net

“Google’s New Developer ID Rule Could Harm F-Droid”

“Google will make you wait 24 hours to side­load Android apps” How-To Geek

“Google will make you wait 24 hours to side­load Android apps”

“An ‘existential’ threat to al­ter­na­tive app stores” The New Stack

“An ‘existential’ threat to al­ter­na­tive app stores”

“I’ve been an Android user for al­most 15 years — and Google’s side­load­ing changes are push­ing me back to iPhone” Tom’s Guide

“I’ve been an Android user for al­most 15 years — and Google’s side­load­ing changes are push­ing me back to iPhone”

“F-Droid Says Google Is Lying About the Future of Sideloading on Android” How-To Geek

“F-Droid Says Google Is Lying About the Future of Sideloading on Android”

“Android Security or Vendor Lock-In? Google’s New Sideloading Rules Smell Fishy” It’s FOSS News

“Android Security or Vendor Lock-In? Google’s New Sideloading Rules Smell Fishy”

“Keep Android Open” Linux Magazine

“Keep Android Open”

“F-Droid says Google’s new side­load­ing re­stric­tions will kill the pro­ject” Ars Technica

“F-Droid says Google’s new side­load­ing re­stric­tions will kill the pro­ject”

“Sideloading is dead for all in­tents and pur­poses. The Android you know and love is slowly dis­ap­pear­ing.” Android Police

“Sideloading is dead for all in­tents and pur­poses. The Android you know and love is slowly dis­ap­pear­ing.”

“F-Droid pro­ject threat­ened by Google’s new dev reg­is­tra­tion rules” Bleeping Computer

“F-Droid pro­ject threat­ened by Google’s new dev reg­is­tra­tion rules”

“Google’s new de­vel­oper rules could threaten side­load­ing and F-Droid’s fu­ture” Gizmochina

“Google’s new de­vel­oper rules could threaten side­load­ing and F-Droid’s fu­ture”

“Open let­ter warns manda­tory reg­is­tra­tion ‘threatens in­no­va­tion, com­pe­ti­tion, pri­vacy and user free­dom’” Infosecurity Magazine