How AI is Transforming Open Source Communities and Digital Innovation

Adam Weeks:
Hey, this is Adam Weeks from openchannels.fm, and today I am joined by my good friend Nate Stewart. Uh, we are going to be diving into AI and how that relates to the open source community. There are a lot of things that because AI is here, it’s changing how we think about open source. And I couldn’t think of anybody better than to talk to Nate, ’cause Nate, you have been around for a long time in the open source community, but you’ve kind of like, you’ve jumped in and then you’ve jumped out and jumped in and jumped out. And all of those were for different reasons. But before I get too far into that, I’d love for you just Quick introduction, who is Nate Stewart?

Nate Stewart:
Yeah, so I’m Nate. I would call myself a big open web fan for pretty much my whole life. How I got into it, I think maybe I was 13 years old when I built my first site. And all of that was off the back of people putting everything out in the open of HTML, JavaScript, how do you just go on the web and figure it out? And from there, went into e-com, built a startup, had that acquired by a company that went public, spent a lot of time in the open ecosystem, including WordPress, and building also other from the ground up open source projects that became pretty key to the company. That company that acquired us was BigCommerce, and their whole strategy was the open SaaS platform. So it was something I built over many, many years with the team there to illustrate the best of open source and of that SaaS platform we built. And now I’m back into open source land with AI and trying to blend the best there as well.

Adam Weeks:
Doing it again. Let’s give people kind of a timeframe, a reference. When did you sell your company like to BigCommerce? Like how long ago was that?

Nate Stewart:
2015.

Adam Weeks:
2015. And then when did you move to Costa Rica? When did that happen?

Nate Stewart:
Puerto Rico.

Adam Weeks:
Puerto Rico.

Nate Stewart:
It’s okay. That’s a normal thing. Yeah, they’re very similar.

Adam Weeks:
Puerto Rico is a different place.

Nate Stewart:
Yeah, that was 2020. So in the middle of COVID And the backstory there is my wife was deep in, I think all of us were in the podcast that were like, how to be a better partner, how to live your best life in the middle of COVID and all this stuff happening. So, she came out one day and is like, I’m going to ask you a question and whatever you say, I will support you. What do you want to do next? And I’m like, I want to live on an island. And she’s like, what does that mean? And I don’t know, it just came out. I want to live on an island. I think a lot of that was all of us were feeling that we needed to get out of our house or apartment or wherever we were. And what’s going to happen there? right, in the future. So let’s do it now. So I made the move, we rented for a couple months, and then we liked it and we ended up staying there almost 5 years. That’s so cool. And then moved to, yeah, San Francisco late last year.

Adam Weeks:
Yeah.

Nate Stewart:
Yeah.

Adam Weeks:
And what was the impetus for that? So you were in Puerto Rico, beautiful place, and you were leaving BigCommerce and starting your own thing at the same time. Was there a spark of an idea that said, yeah, I’m ready to do something different?

Nate Stewart:
It was actually, again, my wife drives a lot of decisions there. She’s like, okay, are you going to slow down for just a little bit? At that point, I’d been building through IPO of BigCommerce for almost 10 years. It’s like, yeah, let’s have some us time. We’re in Puerto Rico at the time. There’s the beach there, rainforest, all this really cool stuff. And I told her, yeah, I’ll slow down. So it actually was not go straight into let’s build a company. It was let’s go just be together and do things. And I did that for a few— I want to say a few months. Okay. For almost 2 months. It wasn’t even a few months, but I did try. I did try. And a lot of that was just trying to say, okay, yeah, I was like, what’s next? Now, did a lot of things I liked doing. Went sailing, went to theme parks, traveled around. I came to SF a couple times and met with my previous co-founder. He’d already moved back to SF while I was going through, just bouncing around the States, and it just drew me back in. There was a lot of— innovation is the wrong word for it. It’s more energy. Keep in mind, this is before I would say in January or over the Christmas break where a lot of the models just started really speeding up in terms of what people could do with it agentically and coding and otherwise. So then it was a lot more experimental energy and people just really trying to figure out what’s the best way to do it. Leading up to that, I was just seeing patterns in what people were doing.

Sponsor Announcer:
Yeah.

Nate Stewart:
I’m more of a pattern guy. I’m like ecosystem. I like seeing how people work. And that’s really what drew me to what I’m working on now, is that confluence of factors of having some headspace, seeing how people are working, seeing the energy. And I’ve been 5 years in Puerto Rico. I mean, at that point, you kind of—

Adam Weeks:
You did it.

Nate Stewart:
Yeah. Now, there are days where, you know, I’m like, oh man, that beach is beautiful. Ready to go back? You know, but, you know, I can always, you know, go back and experience that.

Adam Weeks:
Now, We were on a rooftop at WordCamp US. I wanna say it was, it was in, uh, was it, was last year? Was that last year, man? Time is blending.

Nate Stewart:
Yeah.

Adam Weeks:
And you were really excited about this idea and you’d already started on it. Um, just for the people to understand, you’ve left BigCommerce and you’re ready to solve another problem. I’d like to know, in this age of AI, brains are spinning, things are, you know, the models are changing quickly. And you, you saw that there was a problem and then a, a solution. So let’s start with a problem that you observed that caused, you know, part of even like, you know, moving from your home in Puerto Rico on an island that took you to, to San Francisco. What’s the problem?

Nate Stewart:
So the problem was a lot of what was popping up then, the trend was vibe coding. So now that’s normal. But about a year ago, that was a lot of like Lovable, Bolt.new, all these startups booting up. And the marketing was you can do anything. And I mean, it’s kind of still the marketing, but the capabilities definitely weren’t there for long-running builds. And there were certain types I was seeing that would almost always fail and cause people to do one of many things that are frustrating. Like one set of stories that really just hit me hard is people taking their savings or what was not meant to build an app money and put it towards finishing their lovable project or something else. And those were normally AI-native projects, meaning somebody had an idea for an AI product that could help out somebody or an industry they knew about, and they prompted it and it just couldn’t help them finish that. Now, web apps were going fine, and web apps today are super easy to build. I mean, you can build a lot of things. You can build whole 3D apps and whatnot. But when you think about it, the reasoning is all of that is in the training data. Building AI with AI is not in the training data. You have to use your own intuition and understand what people want to do. So I think that’s where it came from, is seeing people hit the building AI apps with AI was difficult. I just started tracking that. I built a bunch of apps myself to try to figure it out. I joined the Bolt.new hackathon that was for a month and just was in the community seeing what people were building. Just a lot of that, just research, finding, okay, well, this is still happening. Not only for them, but also for founders and for really experienced people that they could build web apps and e-com stores and all of that all day. But then you get them to build an AI experience and It was difficult.

Adam Weeks:
Yeah. So it’s using AI to build other stuff was working pretty well. It’s using AI to build better AI tools. That’s where the struggle was?

Nate Stewart:
Yeah, you look at like, you have to control kind of 2 things. One is the experience on the app or dashboard or whatever you’re building. And that’s when I say web app, it’s that. But then you get to, okay, now you have to tune the agent. You have to give it a personality. You have to tell it what it can and can’t do. you can prevent it from going off the rails and not hallucinating was what we dealt with a lot for most of the time early on. Now a lot of it is, are you using the right tools? Are you asking me for permission in the right areas? There’s a stack of things. There’s like 100 different variables that you have to get right as you scale, and probably like 10 early on that you have to get right or it won’t even work. And people were just kind of struggling with that. You know, we’re getting a little bit better there, but it’s not accessible for everyone like building a website is accessible for everyone.

Adam Weeks:
Yeah.

Adam Weeks:
I want to think of the agency space. Agencies aren’t just asked to build websites very often anymore. They want a digital experience. There’s like a whole— a lot more that comes with that and custom software and AI implementations and like, oh wow, we were just building websites, but now we gotta do a lot more if we’re gonna stay in business.

Nate Stewart:
Yep, yep. There’s a transition from an agency that typically it’s like, oh, we do web work, we do app work, you know, we optimize now to AI agency and AI consultants. For sure, that’s been a major trend over the last year.

Adam Weeks:
Yep, yeah, definitely seeing that. All right, so, We’re on that rooftop, you’re sharing that idea with people, and it’s fascinating, and you decide to move to San Francisco. You started Runtype, that’s the company that you’re getting going. But you also, along with this, because apparently you have too much free time, you’re like, hey, you know, I’m gonna do an open source project inside of this. This is kind of the transition, the story where we’re saying, all right, AI, big deal. We see a problem, we’re going to create Runtype to solve that problem. But then how does that come back to the open source community? What’s this project that you’re doing there?

Nate Stewart:
There’s actually an order there. So Runtype came more beginning of this year. We started rebuilding, actually building Runtype as a company. And what Runtype was actually a different company, a different thing where it was more of me prototyping. When I was saying I was researching, I was actively prototyping. It was almost more automation as you would think about it in this space. A lot of where N8N was hitting blockers and what my research saw, and it’s like, can you build a more AI-native N8N that works with agents better? That was that. It was cool and I learned a lot there, but it wasn’t actually the whole landscape. I learned a couple other things. The second thing I was working on, was actually something called Vanilla Agent and uses Vanilla JS and worked in any site. And the reason that came out is there’s a ton of React and now even Angular, other framework-driven conversational UI libraries out there, but there weren’t a lot for the rest of the web. Most of the web is HTML and JavaScript and not a framework. And not only in something like WordPress, most themes just to drop in React is going to be hard. But every other platform, really, when you get down to it, they’re typically like even a Shopify theme, that’s going to be more like Liquid and whatnot. They’re not all React. So I built that to try to work around the problem of can you make it where this conversational UI is themeable, brandable, customizable, and can drop on any site? So that was step 2 of going around. That became Persona later on after we had Runtype, but then it transitioned.

Adam Weeks:
Persona being your open source project?

Nate Stewart:
Yeah, the open source agent UI library, as we call it now. But yeah, there’s really a 3-step process to going through the research, prototyping, figuring out what’s working, being honest with what the utility is there, building the UI library for the rest of the web, finding out what’s working there, and then run type as kind of the combination of a lot of those factors that we saw, hey, that’s what’s needed to do this efficiently.

Adam Weeks:
Got it. What was the, like, how did it feel important to you that Persona needed to be open source and not just, you know, a closed, you know, what you were selling?

Nate Stewart:
I think, well, I’m very important because my bias is there. You know, I’ve done that a few times and If you’re building something that’s for the whole web, for that, you know, it wants to make to where most sites that aren’t in one of these other frameworks can use it, you kind of have to make it open. It would be weird to say it’s for the open web, but not open, you know? So I think it was just like default there. There also was early research and like even like design partner as we were working with companies, that meant a lot to them around like they could control it down to each individual byte. And that’s just the power of open source is you can see exactly how it’s running. It also is a good forcing function to figure out what’s unique that should be where values derive from and you can build a company around it and what should be shared so that there’s momentum around it. So I think a lot of open source, you want to build momentum and eventually other people feeling like they can make it their own. And I think that’s the right split for how we think about Runtype now, right? Persona now is you can do whatever you want to it. I love that. You could use not Runtype, and that’s fine. We get a lot of joy and happiness around someone just putting it into their product and they don’t really talk to us because that adds up over time, that compounds. And we’ve seen that so many times in the past. So I think it was kind of a natural fit there. I wish I had a better answer from like, I’m biased and that’s the right thing to do. But yeah.

Adam Weeks:
And I think there’s an important thing because it’s the right thing to do only takes businesses so far. Like, yay, you know, we don’t litter because it’s the right thing. Well, yeah, I don’t litter, but there’s a lot of things that it’s the right thing to do but doesn’t necessarily have a strong business case. But what you are experiencing is that This thing that we’ve created doesn’t make sense any other way except for it to be open source. As you are thinking about open source and in this age of AI, does that calculus change at all? Or like, yeah, AI does not change the reason to have something be open source?

Nate Stewart:
Well, There’s a couple of factors in that. It does change things. And I think the people having the hardest moments right now are thinking it doesn’t, trying to basically create work out in the open, but protect themselves from how quickly people are moving. And a lot of times it’s just people that would never ever contribute or never ever be able to use an open source project. It’s too technical. Now they can. So it’s more of a matter of, in my opinion, how do you split up your community and people you’re working with in a human way to guide them in what they should contribute to, what they should try to utilize from it? People still need guidance on, sure, you have Claude, you’re pointing it there. What are you trying to achieve? Okay, I saw that you submitted an issue. What’s your outcome there? It might be that they don’t need to customize anything. They just needed documentation to complete their use case. Well, guide them out. Hey, I would love a contribution in documentation. They could totally do that because they have the use case and they have the problem. So someone else might be hyper-technical, they have an optimization, and that’s a different route of how do you contribute that back or plugins and all that. So I think it’s like waypoint finding, pathfinding is really important. And communication, if you don’t do it right, it’s just like the real world. People need proper communication to know where they can help or not.

Adam Weeks:
Yeah. Oh no, I love that. There are some things that have changed and some things that haven’t.

Nate Stewart:
Yeah.

Adam Weeks:
I don’t know if we’re— how do we go pre-AI, post-AI? I don’t know how we’re—

Nate Stewart:
Well, also, I think it highlights a lot of what we were never good either personally or as an industry or whatever in the first place. Communication. When we talk about documentation, what I was talking about, a lot of products and open source projects don’t have documentation that’s actually helpful enough before, during, after AI. So that’s more of, okay, what’s the blocker there? And we were always trying to move faster, we just kind of always have than we really should have in terms of enablement. You should go along the way, write down what you’re doing, and then put it in documentation. I experienced that building SaaS products and outside of open source where you launch a product and the documentation isn’t there or the team doesn’t know how to sell it. And again, we’ve just been given tools to move way faster. But let’s be honest, we’ve always wanted to move faster than we maybe could. So this is more of an adjustment of Hey, what’s the better way to work in general with and without AI? I think a lot about that, by the way, of what should be AI, what should not. The only way is to really learn yourself and then to apply principles that make sense. Don’t shy away from either side. Just get smarter, understand more about what is this world and try to shape the world in what you want. Don’t let it just happen to you.

Adam Weeks:
Yeah. Just because we can doesn’t mean we should.

Nate Stewart:
Yeah. And keep in mind, everybody is almost— the should button is duct taped down to the— yeah, it’s just there. They ripped off the switch or whatever. That’s going to happen. It’s the knowing that that will happen, that someone will put their foot on the gas and not stop because they have these tools available to them. But that doesn’t mean you can’t be a voice and over time, maybe even influence around asking just good questions around like, okay, so how would someone get started with this if they didn’t have an agent? Someone, they have a bunch of tokens, they have the subscription, they want to spend it on something cool, they want to help. Where do they help? Also, how do you give other people a chance to shine as well? When we launched Persona, I tried to do a really good job of shouting out to all the other open source libraries. that influenced us. Now we’re in a different pocket. A lot of them were React libraries and whatnot. We’re going after a different market of the rest of the web, but Persona still got a lot of value in me designing it and our team looking at it because we had other people that did great work before it. Let’s give a little bit of credit where credit’s due. I think all those things we’re having to re- Analyze, right? And ’cause that’s always been in the world, we’re now just accelerating every aspect of it. Mm-hmm.

Adam Weeks:
For sure. Yeah. Oh man, Nate, this is such a, a great topic and we’ve just started to scratch the surface on this, you know, AI and how it is changing open source. I wanna touch a, a number of these different topics. And so I think what we wanna do, we’re gonna go ahead and wrap it up here because we’ve started to kind of, uh, just scratch at, uh, a few of those topics. I mean, everything from, yeah, what if I want to contribute my tokens to a, a project? Well, how can I do that efficiently? Um, there’s all kinds of things around security and, and what does it mean for our AI agents to have access to all these huge repositories?

Nate Stewart:
Is that, bad actors.

Adam Weeks:
I mean, I was on, you know, on the thread this morning, and there’s another big, oh no, the sky is falling, everybody update. Like, you know, stuff is happening quick. And so yeah, I’m excited to talk to you about does open source matter when code is cheap, and then the human part of that. So I tell you what, let’s have this be our first conversation, one of several where we are pulling at some of these different ideas. And yeah, I would invite people if they have any questions about this topic, anything that’s interesting in open source and the age of AI, we would love to hear about it. Nate, as we’re wrapping this up, if someone wants to, yeah, get in touch with you and learn more about what you’re working on, your open source project, your AI project, how would someone get in touch with you?

Nate Stewart:
I would say nate@runtype.com is the email. And then on X, Become Vocal, just hit me up there.

Adam Weeks:
Become Vocal. That’s a good, yeah, that’s a good handle. Become Vocal. I like it.

Nate Stewart:
You know, it’s an aspirational one. Like, again, my wife would say, you need to follow your username because I always need to get out there more, like we’re doing right now. So I’m becoming more vocal to match that.

Adam Weeks:
All right, well, I’m excited to help ask you questions and learn from you and help you become more vocal. because, uh, Nate, you’re one of the most brilliant guys I know in this space, and you’re doing some really cool stuff, moving from Puerto Rico to Silicon Valley, to the Bay Area to, uh, launch this AI. Uh, we might even get into some of the stuff about, you know, like funding and funding an AI company. I mean, that’s pretty cool stuff, and I can’t wait to talk to you more. So please, um, if you’re not already, uh, subscribe to Open Channels, and we’ll see you guys here again very soon.