Not Brothers

Two weeks, three events, and one clear takeaway: the old way of building software is over.Ryan returns from Rails World, OpenAI DevDay, and an Omarchy meetup in San Francisco with a field report on where AI-assisted development is actually heading. He and Mark compare the conversations happening online with what builders are saying in the room.At Rails World, they unpack the changing role of programmers, why AI does not erase hard-earned technical judgment, and how agents make it easier to choose the right language for the job instead of staying trapped in one stack.Then the conversation moves to OpenAI DevDay: proactive assistants, connected agents, new model performance, and ultra-fast inference. If an agent can produce an hour of work in ten minutes, are you paying more—or buying time back?That leads to the next problem. When generation stops being the bottleneck, human review, browser use, APIs, research speed, infrastructure, and access to compute start taking its place.Finally, Ryan shares what it was like attending his first Omarchy meetup at Cloudflare’s San Francisco office, from veteran users to someone installing Omarchy for the first time at the event.Subscribe for long-form conversations about AI, software, business, operations, and building things in public.Not Brothers: https://heyoodle.com/not-brothers/ Oodle: https://heyoodle.com/Chapters00:00 — Ryan’s two-week developer event tour01:43 — Rails World and the reaction to a changing paradigm06:11 — “Look at all the things I’m not doing”11:26 — Choosing the right language for the job15:31 — Ryan’s biggest Rails World takeaway18:09 — Why agents suddenly feel more capable22:23 — Small, specialized models and private AI27:04 — Inside OpenAI DevDay28:18 — Proactive assistants and connected agents32:23 — Faster models and ultra-fast inference35:10 — Creating at the speed of thought37:45 — Is buying back time worth the price?39:29 — When the human becomes the bottleneck44:56 — Compute demand, hardware prices, and supply49:02 — Ryan’s first Omarchy meetup50:46 — Final recap

What happens when a lifelong Mac and Windows user tries Omarchy for the first time?In Episode 22 of Not Brothers, Mark Hughes installs the Try Omarchy experience on his Mac while Ryan Hughes walks him through the operating system, its keyboard-first workflow, and its tiling window manager. Nothing was rehearsed, so the ARM64 installation gaps and setup surprises stay in the episode.Once Omarchy is running, Mark learns how to move between workspaces, rearrange windows, launch apps, pin a window across desktops, and use the searchable keybinding menu when he gets lost.Then the experiment gets more interesting. Mark asks Claude Code to build a custom switcher that combines applications and browser tabs into a Windows-style Alt+Tab experience. Claude inspects Omarchy’s plugin system, builds the plugin, tests it, and updates the live keybinding. Mark gets a working feature without writing the code himself.Ryan also explains T3 Code and T3 Connect, how he gives AI agents their own development machine, why Omarchy treats the operating system as something users should be able to reshape, and how community plugins are expanding what the system can do.Try Omarchy: https://omarchy.org/Omarchy plugins: https://plugins.omarchy.org/Learn Omarchy: https://learnomarchy.com/Oodle: https://heyoodle.com/Chapters are below. Subscribe for direct conversations about technology, AI, business, and the systems behind the work.Chapters00:00 — A Mac user tries Omarchy 02:33 — Starting the Try Omarchy installation 05:40 — Launching the virtual machine 06:52 — Finishing the Omarchy installer 08:48 — First look at Omarchy and searchable keybindings 10:24 — The Omarchy launcher and installing T3 Code 11:43 — Updating Omarchy before installing apps 13:31 — The ARM64 compatibility gap 14:22 — How Omarchy installs AI tools on demand 15:29 — Signing into Claude Code and 1Password 17:58 — Learning tiling window management 21:02 — Omarchy Quattro’s plugin architecture 22:07 — Asking Claude to build a browser-tab switcher 24:12 — How an agent reverse-engineered a mouse plugin 27:07 — T3 Code, T3 Connect, and remote agent sessions 32:04 — Can the plugin access every browser tab? 35:38 — Workspaces, screen sharing, and a live crash 37:24 — Resuming the Claude Code session 39:50 — The first custom plugin works 40:50 — Why Omarchy is more than Arch and dotfiles 43:41 — Browsing and installing community plugins 46:11 — Combining browser tabs and applications 49:05 — Replacing Omarchy’s default Alt+Tab behavior 49:58 — Making computers fun and personal again 52:41 — How easy is it to try Omarchy? 53:05 — Learn Omarchy and interactive onboarding 57:36 — Custom keybindings and the learning curve 59:53 — Floating, resizing, and pinning windows 1:01:22 — Final verdict on Try Omarchy

Omarchy is moving fast—and AI is changing both what the project can build and what its security team can find.In Episode 21 of Not Brothers, Ryan Hughes and Mark Hughes cover Omarchy’s new website, new infrastructure backing, global meetups, and the people now working full time on the operating system and its open-source foundations.Ryan also breaks down his experience with GPT-6 Astra, Claude Fable 5.1, Meta’s Muse Spark 1.3, and computer-use agents that can navigate a real machine. That power comes with a catch: an agent with access to your computer may use that access in ways you never expected. The conversation moves from frontier models to a more practical question: when should a fast, inexpensive specialist model do the work instead? Ryan shares examples where smaller models matched—or beat—larger models for narrow tasks at a fraction of the cost.Then they get into local AI, HIPAA and data privacy, the rise in reported software vulnerabilities, and why fixing more security issues can be a sign of better visibility rather than worse engineering.Explore Omarchy: https://omarchy.org/ Omarchy news: https://omarchy.org/news/ Omacom Foundation: https://omarchy.org/foundation/ Cua computer-use agents: https://cua.ai/Chapters are below. Subscribe for more direct conversations about technology, business, AI, and the systems behind the work.00:00 — Omarchy, AI, and security00:43 — Omarchy’s new website and a huge week of growth04:32 — The global Omarchy meetup community06:06 — GPT-6 Astra vs. Claude Fable 5.107:17 — Giving AI agents their own computer09:59 — The agent that found an API key and kept spending11:58 — Is this actually AGI?13:15 — Why agent harnesses and memory matter15:03 — Using AI to resume complex work16:37 — Meta Muse Spark 1.3 and a 22-cent site migration18:57 — Orchestrator models and cheaper executors20:13 — Why the biggest model is not always the best model23:06 — Why local AI could break through in 202724:30 — Specialist models vs. giant generalists26:24 — Local models, HIPAA, and data privacy28:01 — Security is everywhere—and imperfect everywhere29:35 — A bizarre USB-drive vulnerability30:50 — Why more security fixes can be a good sign33:11 — Open-source transparency vs. security through obscurity35:46 — The coming security boom36:05 — Closing

No agenda. No single topic. Somehow, still a theme.In Episode 20 of Not Brothers, Mark Hughes and Ryan Hughes start with the latest work around Omarchy, including security tradeoffs, a broader user base, and the Omacom Foundation’s growing investment in desktop Linux.Then the conversation moves into AI-generated music, whether prompting still counts as creativity, and what changes when AI agents can communicate and delegate work to one another. Ryan shares a practical multi-agent security experiment that exposed how easily an authorized agent can become a relay for an unauthorized request.From there, Mark and Ryan look at agent-driven shopping and advertising: how brands may influence AI recommendations, why manipulative source content could become the next black-hat marketing tactic, and whether influencer marketing could eventually shape what models treat as common knowledge.They also get into the FTC and states’ allegations against Amazon’s advertising auctions, Meta’s youth-addiction settlement, corporate penalties that become a cost of doing business, device tracking, cookie banners, and why interruptive advertising still deserves to die.It is a little AI, a little advertising, a little Big Tech, a little conspiracy theory, and exactly enough politics to make sure the episode could not stay untitled forever.Not Brothers is business and tech talk with no nonsense from Mark and Ryan Hughes—Oodle operators, family members, and definitely not brothers.Chapters00:00 — The episode with no title01:05 — Omarchy funding, security, and a broader audience06:27 — AI-generated music and who gets to define art10:16 — Rogue AI agents and the Hugging Face incident13:29 — When agents talk to other agents17:37 — Agent-driven shopping and advertising19:24 — Can brands manipulate AI recommendations?21:46 — Influencer marketing as model training data22:47 — The Black Mirror version of agentic advertising24:24 — Why interruptive advertising deserves to die25:52 — Amazon’s alleged ad-auction manipulation27:59 — Meta, youth addiction, and Big Tech incentives28:43 — When fines become a cost of doing business33:21 — Are our devices still listening?35:20 — Responsible tracking and broken audience cohorts37:47 — Demographics, geographics, and creepy psychographics38:33 — Cookie banners and a universal privacy control40:24 — A spam-reporting model for predatory ads41:12 — Somehow, they solved advertising

Omarchy began as David Heinemeier Hansson’s opinionated Arch Linux setup. Barely more than a year later, it has grown into a distinct Linux distribution, a fast-moving open-source ecosystem, and the centerpiece of the $10 million Omacom Foundation.In Episode 19 of the Not Brothers Podcast, Ryan Hughes explains how he went from building his own Arch-based setup to contributing directly to Omarchy alongside DHH. He walks through the project’s evolution from configuration files into a complete operating-system experience with its own installer, package repositories, mirrors, stable release channel, plugins, and hardware support.Mark approaches the conversation as a Windows and macOS user who has never lived in Linux. Ryan makes the case for Omarchy through tiling window management, keyboard-driven workflows, fast installation, strong defaults, and the idea of a “malleable computer” that people can shape around the way they actually work.They also dig into Omarchy Quattro, the rapid growth of the plugin ecosystem, and the effort to make AI agents first-class parts of the operating system. That includes crash diagnosis, a built-in agent interface, and automated review processes for a community that submitted more than 1,000 plugins in a week.Ryan shares the hard lessons too: package updates that broke systems overnight, bootloader changes that forced emergency fixes, and the need to balance Arch Linux’s bleeding edge with a stable experience for people trying Linux for the first time.The conversation closes with what this work brings back to Oodle: deeper technical judgment, real-world experience operating at scale, and the confidence to solve problems that do not fit neatly inside an existing tool.Explore Omarchy:https://omarchy.org/ Meet the Omacom Foundation patrons:https://omarchy.org/patrons/ Read the $10 million funding announcement:https://omarchy.org/news/2026/08/omacom-foundation-funding-hits-10m/Subscribe for candid conversations about technology, business, AI, and the work behind building things that actually hold up.Chapters00:00 — Omarchy Quattro and the Omacom Foundation02:23 — How Ryan joined the Omarchy project07:11 — Selling Omarchy to a Windows and macOS user12:15 — Speed, installation, and everyday performance18:04 — From side project to a $10 million foundation22:55 — Building an agentic AI operating system26:26 — What scaling open source taught Ryan33:29 — Release-day failures and the stable channel40:35 — How Omarchy strengthens Oodle’s client work45:24 — Ryan’s idea of a relaxing weekend