It's so disappointing to watch trmnl, a really interesting hardware product concept, transition into being just another AI company.

i founded TRMNL and didn't try AI myself until ~2 months ago. i'd rather shut down down and open source everything (per our Unbrickable Pledge) than become "just another AI company."

the AI Agent exists to empower less technical folks to turn their vision into reality, and we're proud of what's possible with it. meanwhile our top community developers continue to hand craft beautiful, useful plugins for everyone to install, LLM free.

Non technical users cannot code. If you want non-technical users to customize the product they purchased you have three options. - Add a narrow surface of customizability hardcoded into the application: colors, maybe fonts, picking from the plugins others have created - Provide a bounded method for using LLMs to generate some code from user requirements, plugin documentation (with code/architectural conventions), and probably some guardrails build process. - Tell them to just YOLO using vanilla claude code/codex

Previously most "personal computing" (building custom stuff for your specific needs) was limited to people that either already are intimately aware of how computers and programming work, or people that were interested in starting down that path.

Plenty of people do not have the time/energy to go down that path, but still want custom stuff. Yes you can't zero-shot robust enterprise software, but the models are good enough to few-shot solid results when it's bounded to some interface requirements (like an SDK).

I don't make many predictions but this is one I am comfortable saying is the future of personal computing and what "harnesses" will look like in the future. Models will shrink and post-train to the use case at the enterprise level, and agent harnesses will go from things like codex/claude code to what look like self-assembling software. Give regular users an app with a plugin system, an agent, and a clear set of entry points and thats all they need to run.

Is this really transitioning into another AI company? It's an integration for having a 3rd party AI vibe code plugins for their hardware's interface.

[flagged]