March 10, 2026

Don't bust the crust

Last week I went on my first trip to Sedona. While I’ve spent some time in the red desert of Australia, there was something particular about this ecosystem: towering columns of layered rock, and a surprising abundance of life bursting out of the desert floor.

I was there for a team gathering, our third since founding Telepath. My co-founders Stephen, Josh and I are all remote. We’re scattered between San Francisco, Mendocino County, and southern Arizona, and I spent the last four months even further away in Sydney. Remote work suits us well, but we’ve found that a regular cadence of meeting in person is essential for percolating ideas that require ambient, deep contact.

But for now, I want to talk about crust.

One thing you learn hiking at Sedona is to not bust the crust. There’s this crunchy, marshmallow-like layer on the surface of much of the soil — a combination of microbes, fungal strata, and microscopic plant life. It’s a complete ecosystem that provides nutrients for plant life, and protects the land from water runoff (useful in a desert with a dry climate punctuated by monsoonal rains).

Open-source software is a bit of a crust. It’s a complex web of dependencies, an interlocking mesh that the inhospitable land of raw code more liveable. And just like the tiny cyanobacteria, sometimes the smallest pieces of this network can be vital (even if they don’t look particularly glamorous).

There’s a lot of talk in the open-source community currently about what it means when code can just be generated, and entire libraries can be forged.

So in the spirit of the crust, I’m releasing a few tiny open-source packages that I’ve found useful in my work, and adding a new “Software” section to my site to host them.

• store-thing: a reactive store that persists state to localStorage
• emitter: a event emitter class that I use across projects
• dependencies: a dependency injection module modelled of VSCode’s codebase
• disposable: a consistent interface to define a disposable object (e.g. an object you need to unsubscribe from)
• daemon: a reliable way to add background cli processes to macOS & Linux

Each package contains a full README with information about how I use it, and why I keep coming back to these simple primitives across projects.

Working on low-level building blocks in the era of coding agents might seem backwards. But, firstly, I am slightly obsessed and I care about these elements of craft. And secondly, I actually find it’s the opposite: these are the most useful things to build right now. Good primitives give the models solid scaffolding to build on, an agentic harness in OpenAI terminology. Agents work well when they have nicely shaped lego blocks to play with.