From Ideas to Micro Apps with Spacefast

Dave Lockie: Hello and welcome to this episode of Open Channels. I am your co-host today, Dave Lockie, with my fellow co-host, Robert Jacobi. And it is our absolute pleasure to have in the studio Batuhan İçöz, who is founder and currently pushing SpaceFast at a million miles an hour within Automattic. And what the heck the future of the agentic web is. That’s what I’m really excited to get into today. So yeah, welcome. Maybe give us a little spiel. Hello, where are you calling in from?

Batuhan İçöz: Yeah, all that stuff. First of all, thank you. Okay, so I am, as Dave said and asked, I’m the CEO founder of SpaceFast. SpaceFast is our new agentic product at Automattic, where we’re trying to figure out what the future of the web will look like and how people will be making stuff because everything is changing and no one has the right answers. So we’re trying things out and experimenting with how to make building on the web better now that everyone can be a builder. And I’m right now in my Amsterdam apartment. Uh, but have been traveling so much. I don’t know where my tax residency is these days. Like, I’m all over the place.

Dave Lockie: If you, if you’d like to state your tax residency just for, uh, just in case the authorities are listening, then yeah, feel free.

Batuhan İçöz: I’m a legal resident of the Netherlands, uh, and this is where I pay taxes, unfortunately.

Robert Jacobi: My default answer to that is always Malta. You know, whatever. Yeah. Let everyone else figure it out.

Dave Lockie: Cayman Islands.

Batuhan İçöz: Yeah. I’m not sketchy at all.

Dave Lockie: Well, look, we’re all citizens of the web now. Like, where do you, where do you, um, you know, if you’re online, um, a chronic online nomad, then I think that is a question, but it’s probably not the question for today’s podcast.

Batuhan İçöz: If you could answer it, that would be very useful.

Dave Lockie: Okay. Next time around, let’s take a run at that one, Robert. But from a tax perspective, yeah, I think probably paying tax in the Netherlands is what makes sense for you right now.

So SpaceFast came out of May’s Radical Speed Month at Automattic. Everyone decided to just token max, do a whole bunch of crazy stuff, and SpaceFast emerged as this kind of shining and clear example of A, what it’s now possible to do given that space of time with a clear idea and some good kind of product skills. It also, I’m going to say, like, it surprised me both in how obvious a thing it was to do, but also how I had kind of not thought about doing something like that at all, because I had been thinking about RSM as like, okay, well, our constraints are WordPress, and this is a thing that is not WordPress. And I really admire the way that you looked at, you took a step back and looked at the primitives, like it’s infrastructure, it’s hosting, and were able to plot, to imagine a product that would be in line with Automattic’s commercial interests, values, philosophy, strengths, assets, everything else, and come out the other side with this sort of very clear idea. So yeah, kudos for that. And perhaps you could start by telling us, where did the idea for SpaceFast come from and how did you do that kind of magic trick that I’ve perceived from the outside?

Batuhan İçöz: I think taking a step back and explaining what Radical Speed Month experiment was at Automattic could be the best way to start. So one day, sort of out of the blue for most people, Matt had this post where he basically said, hey, between these dates, apart from our contractual obligations, everyone just pair up with someone and build whatever you want, no constraints. And his only thing was like, hey, leaders of this company, do not interfere with whatever the people are doing. They’re able to, like, they will be able to do whatever they want and deploy whatever they want.

So while that was happening, I was getting these like Vercel links and GitHub questions about, from non-technical friends. So I got this close lawyer friend and he’s been asking me about GitHub and Vercel and Cloudflare and how to deploy things, how to secure things, how to build things. And he got into like Claude Code, started building things. Mind you, this is like April, I think. Uh, yeah, I think RSM was April, Radical Speed Month. So still early days, a couple of months after Opus 4.5 revolutionized kind of agentic coding. And we went from like vibe coding to actually building stuff.

And I had this itch for a long time of building something on top of Automattic’s infrastructure. My view of Automattic, and this is, I’ll clarify, my view, is it’s a kick-ass infrastructure company that has been only focusing on making WordPress amazing. But the fundamental things that we’ve been building for 20 years are way beyond WordPress. We have 26 data centers around the world. We have technical capability. Everything is in-house. And we were only using these technologies, this infrastructure for WordPress. So I wanted to create something where I can just like upload some static files and have the, have our edge, our CDN serve them extremely fast. And then I did that. Built a project around all of my itches and how I think should work and how I think agents will like to work and how to provide guardrails for agents and all of that stuff.

And then you hit every static, like every static hosting solution hits these obstacles where you want to add a form, you want to manage content and you start to add some like backend dynamism. And then I was like, hey, I’m already running this on the infrastructure that we run like wordpress.com. So I already have databases that I can give to people. I already had transactional email that I can give to people. So I started pulling more pieces into it and it kind of pivoted from like a, hey, this is a kick-ass for agents static hosting solution to this is a thing that will help you build faster, better, and then publish on the web securely and simply. And that’s just, you know, collecting a lot of the ideas that I’ve already had and mingling them with the infrastructure of Automattic. The hard part of building something like this is always the infrastructure, or you’re just like another AWS wrapper. But the hard part was already done. Like I didn’t even have to ask people anything. I just, you know, asked our internal AI for APIs and stuff and just hacked together. It works.

Dave Lockie: Yeah, it works great. It’s a really nice alternative to just relying on Anthropic or OpenAI’s kind of artifact hosting. And this is definitely not kind of bashing those products and companies because they’re amazing. But I do think it’s healthy, particularly for a company like Automattic, to think about what does an agentic stack look like and which are the components of that stack that you want to have freedom and portability and we could say democratization over rather than just fire hose into OpenAI and then you’re kind of locked in, the barbs are set. And yeah, that’s like that kind of, I guess, centralization maxing, consolidation maxing versus composability and freedom and portability, I think is a really interesting tension at this time. And one that we are well placed to kind of explore at Automattic given the, you know, given the context and our values and our mission.

Batuhan İçöz: I mean, I’m glad I was too slow. So those products came out before we did, but at the time we built this project and opened it internally, ChatGPT sites didn’t exist. Claude Artifacts was nothing like it is today, but it’s not like I had these like extremely innovative ideas. I can see a lot of companies converging on the same thing. I think one of my maybe spiciest takes is a lot of products will just look like each other in a couple of years, like Notion and ChatGPT and WordPress will probably look a lot like each other in a couple of years. We’re just running towards the same thing. And it’s just a side effect of software being cheap, actually. Like, and like democratizing publishing is something that like is in our core statement, but like, I think SpaceFast helps with the power of AI, which we’re not providing, others are providing that, democratizing building software in general because it’s so easy now.

Robert Jacobi: I’m curious to see how WordPress, Notion, and let’s say ChatGPT all of a sudden become the same thing. Since… are we talking about from the creation of the content to the actual digestion of the content to everything in between? Is this an engineering thing or is this… you know, there’s so many aspects or different ways we can look at what you just said. And I’m curious if that’s from an engineering, creator, builder, consumer perspective that you think all these will be sort of in some grand unified content theory.

Batuhan İçöz: I mean, I think the problem is we’re still looking at WordPress as just content management. So I’ll dig into that first. So again, this is my view and how I am approaching building products at SpaceFast. I think WordPress, you know, it started out as a great like blogging platform and it was only seen for something that was for bloggers. And then it evolved into more general content management and it kind of rocked the world and became the most powerful and the best content management system in the world. And then it added on with the advance of like WooCommerce, it added e-commerce and it became a full-fledged platform and it made making websites extremely easy for a lot of people.

But today we’re at a point where CMS in general, it’s not just a WordPress thing. CMS in general is not something you need for most websites. So just from looking from that perspective, I keep thinking about this existential question of like, what should be the future of WordPress? And that’s not for me to decide. That’s not even for Matt to decide. That’s for the community and people who love WordPress to decide, but we have to try ideas. So my approach to those ideas is I look at WordPress, I look at what it brings to the table, and I look at what people will be needing in the next months and years. And the way that I see it, WordPress is a great stack for building personal software, building your own apps. We’re just not packaging it correctly for that use case.

And we have a project at SpaceFast called Zero that kind of aims to attack that space where you can build agents with it. You can make WordPress your content management for your agent memories and skills. And also on top of that, quickly build interfaces and build like a pantry tracker for your own house or build like a small survey application, just one of the things that you can build on top of WordPress. And WordPress gives you all the guardrails, all the hooks, all the systems that will make it easy to do. The way that I look at WordPress these days is not a CMS, but a Supabase kind of product. It has all the right pieces. It’s just not packaged correctly as of today. Which is something that we’re tackling at SpaceFast, like figuring out what could the future of WordPress look like.

And my approach is coming from like this one throwaway sort of sentence Matt told me a couple of months back where I was sort of criticizing where WordPress might go. And he said, you know what your problem is? You’re looking at WordPress as a thing. But it’s a movement and it is a, it’s a movement of values. It’s a movement of community. And that gave me sort of the license to think outside of the box and outside of the CMS box, outside of the blogging and e-commerce box. And it kind of became clear to me that, hey, what we have is a great application building platform in a time where people will be building so many applications and they don’t even need to scale. They’re going to build their own personal software to scratch their own itches. And WordPress is actually a perfect platform for that.

Robert Jacobi: I was just… I’m just trying to find that intersection of where WordPress and SpaceFast, I’ll use those specifically as the products we’re talking about, you know, where, how does that sort of exist? And what, you know, if I take my WordPress site today in the most generic sense possible, throw it into SpaceFast because there are hooks and tools to integrate existing sites. What should I be thinking to do besides just WordPress?

Batuhan İçöz: Okay, so first, I need to make it clear, and I’ll make it clear on our like marketing material too. SpaceFast is the worst way to host WordPress. It is one of the worst ways of using the traditional way of using WordPress. If you, if you need to use WordPress as it’s intended today, I don’t have to tell you guys, we have WordPress.com, Pressable, same infrastructure, great products. But the way that we are approaching it, we’re not allowing to install any themes. We are not even actually allowing WordPress to render anything. We’re kind of using it as a backend framework and we’ve built this whole new framework that allows you to write some definitions. Well, your agent will write it, but like… in theory, you can also, like a caveman, open an editor and write code yourself into the configuration.

Robert Jacobi: I like that coders are now cavemen.

Batuhan İçöz: Yeah, what are coders anymore? And you can build up a definition of an app. And then we built this whole tech stack where it allows you to build up the full backend using WordPress. It literally, for the nerds out there, it literally takes TypeScript code and compiles it down to PHP and installs it as a WordPress plugin. So the whole system can work on any host. Like it’s just creating PHP files. It’s nothing special. You can upload it to your existing WordPress site running wherever, provided if they have like, hopefully they have recent versions of PHP and WordPress and you can do that.

Robert Jacobi: Or at least patched versions.

Batuhan İçöz: Yeah, yeah, yeah, hopefully. But, and you’re not going to get the best experience if you’re mixing and matching. But on SpaceFast, we’re not allowing to mix and match. You’re only using WordPress as the way that we intended at SpaceFast, which is a platform for building backends, platform for building personal software. And you just deploy that configuration file and it becomes the whole backend.

The magic of this, the thing that I always try to solve for is building things needs to be easy and fun. And whatever we do, we need to make building better than what it would’ve been otherwise. So the magic of this is your AI writes 20 lines of code in TypeScript, which it knows very well. It can type check, it can verify before it even runs the thing. And then that becomes a whole WordPress backend that is versioned. You can go and check the old versions and you can deploy it again anywhere, not just SpaceFast. It will work much faster and way better with SpaceFast, but that’s just, we are optimizing for it. Everyone can optimize for it. And that’s the intended way that we’re using WordPress. Again, this is just an experiment.

Like I think if you wanna manage content and the same framework actually allows you to do more than just building apps. If you’re doing a personal blog, the way that people, a lot of people prefer to do that these days, especially engineers, is just Markdown files, right? Like we’re seeing a lot of it on Twitter. People are just saying, hey, like I have Markdown files. Why do I need a database? And I’m like, yeah, I think you’re kind of right. So the same framework allows you to 2-way sync between your Markdown files and WP admin. So bridging the gap of how we build things today as an industry and how WordPress, the flexibility and the power and ease of use WordPress gave people before.

And to connect that into my everything will look the same comment, Notion is adding so many like backend features. You can deploy like workers and API backends into Notion. They’re now defining themselves as like a company brain with memory and content management for all of your company stuff and goes beyond that. You can actually make apps inside of Notion. You can use their chat to build apps. I think in a world where software is extremely cheap and easy to produce, the solutions where you provide some AI, provide some guardrails, and allow people to just wish their… wish things into existence with custom code is going to be the only platform.

Why would you use, and this is going to be spicy, but why would you go and use a plugin that was intended for a lot of people to use? So it’s not probably not perfect for you. Why would you use that instead of just asking the exact things that you want out of a plugin, out of a software package itself, and just build it? And I think what will remain from a lot of the SaaS platforms, except ones that are kind of like source of truth, like we’re not going to replace Salesforce probably, but…

Robert Jacobi: I think you have to say that, don’t you? That’s like a legally legal thing you have to say.

Batuhan İçöz: I can neither confirm or deny that. But yeah, well, we can also say Oracle, like, you’re probably not going to replace those guys. But a lot of SaaS is just software, and a lot of it you don’t need. You just need the parts that you need and you need some guardrails and common infrastructure around it. Like you need SSO to go log into your system and you need audit logs for everything that you do at a company. At a personal level, you probably don’t even need those things. And I think the platforms that will win will build on their infrastructure strength or their distribution strength and will be the ones that allow you to build your own thing in the way that you want it. Like, that’s why we’re seeing a lot of traction with Lovable. Lovable is a full-stack, like, building platform. Why go to some random SaaS and wait for features to come when you can just go and ask for the 3 features that you’re actually interested in and custom make them?

And today it still has a lot of friction, but I suspect, and I actually believe, next frontier models will solve it all. And I can say that confidently because today, if you give a good enough harness to Opus 5.5, there’s nothing a regular person can’t do. Like, I’m not… there’s a lot of architectural things that I need to go deep dive in when I’m building SpaceFast. But when I’m building my own stuff for my own life, I have this like real-time to-do app that I share with my Grokbot. Like that, I don’t even know how that works. Like it’s on SpaceFast. It uses some of the SpaceFast stuff, but I don’t know. I don’t need to know how that works. That’s… if I wanted to use Todoist, which has way better features and way more polished, I could, but I don’t need those features. I just need a way for my agent and me to synchronize, and I just have that.

Robert Jacobi: And I love that you bring up Todoist because I love the app and I almost never use it anymore because it’s almost too much for what I actually need to get done. Um, Dave hasn’t gotten a, you know, a word in edgewise, which is awesome for once. Um, do you even see like SpaceFast having its own marketplace then for sort of these custom kind of micro apps, if we’re going to call it that?

Batuhan İçöz: So we already have this discover section that we’re kind of improving. The way that I’m approaching that is we’ll have recipes. I don’t think I need to share code with you. I need to share workflows with you. And then you can take… your agents can take that and build the thing. In the exact same way. And that’s the way that we’re approaching it. We also made it possible for anyone to make their spaces open source, and then they can put it on the Discover page and everyone can remix them, which is just cloning the code and making your AI edit them, which makes things faster, but I think it’s less magical. The more magical thing is having your agent kind of interview you into the exact things that you want and creating bespoke software. I think that’s more magical and it’s going to get faster and easier.

Robert Jacobi: I love it.

Dave Lockie: Interesting that you should say about coders and cavemen, because in some ways they were, right? They were the first people to encode. Well, maybe not. Maybe an anthropologist will correct me, but as far as I know, like people drawing pictures of things and starting to create symbols that reference external things. That’s the genesis of encoding, right? Taking these kind of intersubjective concepts and encoding them into things that can transcend space and time.

Anyway, on the convergence of experiences, certainly my experience is that, and you’ve both kind of mentioned this a little bit, the things that we think of as software, like as applications, those are tools for people. You had to understand that the tool exists. You had to learn to use the tool, and the tool was there in service of a particular outcome, right? You had an intent, and once you were clear about expressing that intent, there was like arbitrarily chained tools that would help you achieve that intent. And I think because human society, business, et cetera, have got so complex, we’ve kind of lost sight of that thing. We imagine that driving automation is a job in itself rather than it being like a tool to achieve an outcome of developing great relationships with people.

And the thing that I am kind of noticing is that this era of AI agents, whatever we’re going to call it, is one in which we kind of collapse that back down, right? Like the work is actually to truly ask really interesting questions and then be able to express those intents in a very clear way. And then magic happens and that outcome happens at the end. And I think the major shift is we’ve gone from lots of people driving tools that are chained together in these kind of complicated and frankly not very human ways in order to deliver that outcome to agents using those tools in order to drive those outcomes. And there’s lots of conversation about what things now need a software tool compared to just like an LLM call with the right context. But in terms of like how we are going to experience these tools, I think that will be in whichever way suits us. Some people will have a toy that you chat to. Some people will live in Todoist. Some people will live in Slack or email.

And it’s a little bit like the way I experience work now is I bring a particular set of skills and a particular set of deficiencies to try and achieve an outcome. And where I have those skills, I can do them directly. And where I have deficiencies, I can stand up agents to be in support of those things. And so I think whatever is your interface, because I think we still need these shared interfaces with our agentic team so that we can understand what’s happening. Because if you can’t understand, you can’t be accountable, you can’t learn, you can’t evolve. And SpaceFast for me is a very agnostic way of developing what that interface looks like for you and being able to connect lots of tools into that interface so that the magic can happen and the outcomes can be achieved.

Batuhan İçöz: Yeah, I think you said something that kind of stood out to me, like the clear intent part. I think that’s just a transitionary thing. I think today, if you talk to your AI, we call it on our marketing material, your AI, because agent doesn’t mean anything to normies. They’re like, what does that mean?

Robert Jacobi: Normies. I can’t believe you said to normies.

Batuhan İçöz: Well, sue me. Yeah, well, to people that are not as terminally online as the rest of us.

Robert Jacobi: How’s that?

Batuhan İçöz: Yeah, the people who have a healthy relationship with their social feed. Well, they might not, but, you know, at least with X, I guess.

Dave Lockie: Or just have healthy relationships, full stop.

Batuhan İçöz: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Robert Jacobi: Thank you, Dave.

Batuhan İçöz: Yes, I’ll accept that. I think you don’t need clear intent anymore. And I think that’s one of the beauty, like the beauty of building with AI. You can just iterate so fast and you can create a feedback loop so fast. You know, I just like vomit some voice note to my agent and like yap for a couple of minutes. And then it comes back with something and I just yap more and like try to get it to the perfect place that I want. And I might know what I want better than most people, uh, because I’m technical. I kind of understand how the systems that I’m building behind the scenes works. But, you know, a person that is not as technical as me will probably get there with 3 more prompts versus me with 3 less prompts. Like, it’s not that different anymore.

And I think common interfaces is an important thing that you pointed out. I think people will still want to click buttons. Will people still want to see things? I think conversational interfaces, as nice as they are, they’re less high bandwidth than you would want in sort of a business scenario. Like, you don’t want to ask for your to-dos and get a chat back. You want to look at a screen and see it all.

Robert Jacobi: Or I want those in my calendar so I can just go through those 1, 2, 3.

Batuhan İçöz: Yeah, exactly. But the beauty, I think, with something like SpaceFast, and this isn’t exclusive to SpaceFast, but we make it easier than most other platforms, is you might have a certain way of understanding information and want to look at it, and I might have a certain different way of looking at it. So you can build different dashboards for different people that connect to the same data. And we still have the shared context, but we consume the information in the best way for us. Maybe you just want to make work fun and you want your interface to look like Windows 95, and you should be able to do that. Like, we’re no longer limited.

Dave Lockie: Did you just say Windows 95 and fun in the same, like, did that just happen?

Batuhan İçöz: It’s fun if you’re not actually using the thing. If it’s just nostalgia, nostalgia is fun. Okay. Yeah. I wonder how many vulnerabilities…

Robert Jacobi: For those of you who weren’t around when Windows 95 came out, it was fun because it was so different than anything else that had happened at the time.

Batuhan İçöz: I was born in ’95, so I don’t get to comment too much on that, I guess.

Dave Lockie: You definitely do not, right? Just stop the podcast right now. Look, I want to push back very gently and respectfully. I think we’re both talking… we’re actually arguing for the same thing, like how you develop that intent, whether it’s like you, you know, you make one pot or a thousand pots. Uh, I think we’re actually talking about the same thing. Like it’s figuring out what you actually want to happen. Um, but yeah.

Batuhan İçöz: One thing that also I’ll add onto something that you said is like making things for humans. I always tell my team, we’re not making things for agents. We’re making things for humans using agents. There’s a subtle difference there that I really care about. Uh, like this can’t just be good for agents. It needs to provide something to the user while being easy for an agent to use, because at the end of the day, this is all for humans.

Dave Lockie: It’s an interesting one, isn’t it? Like, at what distance does that work need to happen? Does that tool need to be kind of present in a human psyche for it to benefit the human though. We are going fairly deep and philosophical on this one. One of the things I’ve been kind of dwelling on a little bit is there is work that people should do and then there is work that robots should do. There is humane work and inhumane work, if you like. And some examples of things that I think are not naturally human, maybe that’s a less loaded term than inhumane, but production line, manufacturing production, repeating the same kind of simple physical tasks over and over again is not something that people naturally do. It’s better suited to mechanical execution of that task.

And my hope is, I guess, being the kind of techno optimist that these kinds of technologies as they evolve will allow more people to do more humane work more of the time as we offload the kind of important but not naturally human work to be behind the scenes. And how that gets monetized and paid for and who builds it and how, if at all, people experience that, I think is, it’s kind of an interesting question. Do you care about how your Uber Eats arrives on your doorstep, or do you just care that it does arrive and it is hot and it is what you ordered? How much of the sausage factory do you actually wish to be aware of?

Batuhan İçöz: Well, I don’t want to be aware of it maybe, but, and not to get too philosophical, but if you take that to its natural conclusion, then you gotta ask, how will people make the money to buy Uber Eats? Like, that’s where it kind of devolves into when you have AI and robotics, which is a robotics revolution is also happening at the same time of this, like LLM AI revolution is happening. And if you take that to its conclusion, then it kind of means there will be a couple of companies that can produce and do everything. And then where do you get to wealth distribution?

And how do I, I used to be a raging capitalist like a year ago, 2 years ago. Uh, but now I’m more like, if we actually do capitalism right, the entire world is in danger. So like, there’s that tension in my mind nowadays where like, most everything that produces economical value will be able to be made by robots essentially. And if you do that, how are people going to create a living? Like take Automattic, for example, Automattic in its 20 years has employed thousands of people and shared the wealth created by the creation of the software and infrastructure that was built. But if you’re building it today, you probably wouldn’t need thousands of people. You would need less people. That means less wealth distribution. It would be better for the founder, but not for the general economy. But I don’t want to divulge too much. We can talk about this over beer if you want.

Robert Jacobi: Oh yeah, I’m loving this. So we’re going to touch on Adam Smith’s invisible hand, but actually to kind of circle the square all the way back to what you had mentioned earlier about WordPress and community and to tie it into what Dave mentioned about quote unquote, I’ll say I’ll use the first word because I don’t want to use the inhumane working. You know, we’re making assumptions about how people want to use tools, technology, and spend their time. And communities can happen magically around those things. So to say that a bunch of folks are doing redundant mechanical work all the time doesn’t mean that there isn’t a community and a voice and an expression of creativity and experience around that.

But I love where AI and these tools can actually help us expand those opportunities for those. If I want to work on a factory line, which, to Dave’s point, is probably going to slowly disappear into the ether at some point just because of AI and roboticization. How can we encourage people to actually be more creative or think if they think about new technologies, new businesses, and all that around AI and community, if they’re going to be displaced at some point?

Batuhan İçöz: I think the hardest thing the society needs to reckon with, and this is a big sentence, but is unlearning what we think we know. And we’re kind of experiencing a small version of it in engineering. I have a lot of engineer friends, obviously, and we talk a lot and there were things that we knew to be true. Quick example, if 2 or 3 years ago, you told me that you’re going to do a big rewrite of a big project, I would say that you’re dummy. Like, never do software rewrites. They never work. You’re going to end up with 2 systems and it’s never going to work. It’s never going to be good. Today, if you come to me and tell me, uh, you’re going to do something like that, I’ll tell you, oh, uh, is it going to take like a week? Like, go for it.

Dave Lockie: Let’s go to the pub. It’ll be done by the time we get back.

Batuhan İçöz: Yeah, exactly. And there’s a lot, and like, we used to care about having the code be beautiful. Like the guy who wrote the Clean Code book is vibe coding and saying, why do you care about how the code looks? And we had a lot of learnings, how you scale up an engineering team, how you approach every work. And we have to unlearn all of that today to create software in this new world and be competitive.

And I think the software world is sort of like a canary in the coal mine sort of situation where we are experiencing this first. But we will have to experience this on a societal level. What does school mean, traditional school mean, when information is this easy to access? What does being a mathematician mean when thousands of digital scientists in a data center can churn out mathematical problems that have been plaguing the mathematicians for hundreds of years? What does it mean to be… student of science, like all of these things we need to unlearn so that we can start to figure out how, how the new world will work. So I don’t know the answers.

Dave Lockie: Oh man, you don’t know the answer. This is such a good… I was waiting for the answers there, that’s why now I’m sad.

Batuhan İçöz: Yeah, well, I’m sorry. I’m not going to give you the answers.

Robert Jacobi: Take a look at SpaceFast first.

Batuhan İçöz: Yeah. I’ll just fix my corner of the universe, tiny, tiny corner of the universe, and we’ll see how that goes.

Dave Lockie: Well, and I think if everyone does that, then we’ll be good.

Batuhan İçöz: Hopefully. We didn’t even define SpaceFast, I think. We just went into it.

Robert Jacobi: SpaceFast is fast spaces. I mean, during this entire conversation, I’ve actually rebuilt my website 3 times on SpaceFast. I’m not even kidding. I’m like, to the side, just like, uh, how do I tweet this and what can I do? And yeah, I mean, and that’s been, you know, a 40-minute conversation.

Batuhan İçöz: Were we that boring?

Robert Jacobi: No, I just wanted to do it in real time. It’s just kind of like that experiment, like how are we changing the universe and, and the things I can do. Um, yes, because I’ve been playing with SpaceFast a little bit, but I really got into it because of the conversation. And, um, it’s… I was like, you’re right. Holy cow. I’ll send you a link later, but…

Batuhan İçöz: Well, I, I get a notification everyone does anything. My notifications never stop. I’ll stalk your account after this.

Robert Jacobi: Oh, oh man. That’s scary.

Dave Lockie: As we draw to a close, I think you’re right, Batuhan. I think it would be fair to give you a kind of come use SpaceFast for XYZ reasons. So yeah, go for it. Let’s dial it back from solving the world’s problems to solving out how to deploy what you’ve built effectively.

Batuhan İçöz: Yeah. And that’s the, I think, biggest misunderstanding of what I’m trying to do with SpaceFast. A lot of people’s minds goes to the hosting piece of it or publishing piece of this, but it’s actually kind of more than that. My definition for SpaceFast is it helps you build better and then publish on the web. And that build better piece is actually very important to me. We have built-in skills. We have the recipes that we’ve already talked about. We have design systems. We have connectors. You’re able to, let’s say you have a lot of data in some data warehouse. You connect that in, in our dashboard, or your AI can just do it as well. And then your AI writes like 5 lines of code, and then you have secure audited access to those, that data warehouse, and you can build a dashboard. If you add SpaceFast to your toolchain after you built the thing, you’re going to do so many things to get to that point where SpaceFast gives you all the abilities in a couple of lines. It has memory so you can take what you built on ChatGPT and then take it to Claude and have a reasonably good experience and just have it be portable.

So it’s not just a place where after you built something, you put it up. You can do that. Like you can move from Vercel, Cloudflare, Lovable, right into SpaceFast and it will work. But if you start building with SpaceFast using the features the platform offers, you’re just going to get to what you want to build way faster. And the end result will be more secure and will be more, will be better. And I think that’s the, that’s the space that I want to compete in anyways. Like hosting is commoditized. Everyone can do it. We can do it better than everybody else at Automattic, but it’s still commoditized. If I help you build the thing, agnostic of whatever AI you use, and then after you build the thing, I help you with payments, with WooPayments, I help you with ads. We already have an ads network, monetize the website that you’re building, help you run a business, help make sure that you get the best analytics that you want, cookie-free. That is the value add that we can bring to the table as Automattic on top of our great infrastructure and as SpaceFast.

So like putting something out there kind of was hard when I started in April, way easier now. I think everyone can do it. You can go to Netlify if you just have a couple of HTML files. You can go to us as well. You go to drop.website. It’s a domain that you can just drag and drop to SpaceFast, but I think the real magic happens when you use it from the start, have it in your context, in your agent, and use the platform’s features. Then you can get to something really special.

Dave Lockie: Well, if you haven’t educated anyone else on SpaceFast today, you’ve certainly educated me. Thank you for joining us and going to some interesting places with this conversation. We were like, hang up the call and go build some stuff on SpaceFast. So, okay, enough talking. Let’s go. Let’s go build.

Batuhan İçöz: Yeah. Or just have some beers and think about the doom of everything, society.

Dave Lockie: Or rebuild Doom in Rust or whatever the platform is.

Robert Jacobi: Different kind of Dooms.

Dave Lockie: All right, guys. It’s been a pleasure.

Robert Jacobi: Thank you. Another Open Channels Network conversation.