22: Sovereign Engineering w/ Yo

“Permissionless, permissionless, permissionless.”

Yo & Gigi take a walk in Madeira. Recorded during SEC-07.

Listen on sovereignengineering.io

In this dialogue:

• Gigi’s AI setup: voice prompts via vibeline to brainstorm, brainstorm to implementation plan, cron job that tackles one to-do every 20 minutes, builds overnight
• One agent per project: dergigi.com/projects, each agent spins up with an nsec and gets to work
• Nihao: Gigi’s skill for spinning up Nostr identities from the terminal
• Claude Code “Mythos” codewords leaked – swearing at your models actually helps
• Planner vs developer vs tester: three distinct personas, separation of powers for AI-assisted development
• Separate sessions for questions vs implementation, like separation of powers
• “Are you human?” vs “Are you useful?” – the only question that matters
• PoW + WoT = useful. “Sats are just difficulty-adjusted PoW.”
• Dialogical development – Vervaeke on why dialogue, not monologue, is how you actually think
• Opponent processing – Vervaeke: competing forces sharpen each other
• DiaLogos and the importance of walking dialogue
• Opus maximalism ended yesterday: Anthropic cutting off OpenClaw, now broke, looking at cheaper models and local hardware
• Routing models: OpenRouter and Routstr now route between thinking and simple models automatically
• Yo’s Sovereign Engineering journey: showed up to SEC-04 with no programming experience, three weeks’ notice, on a climbing trip visa
• SEC-04 was the vibe coding big bang: Paul showed the way, Calle tried to build a Cashu client live, Paul beat him to it
• Got offered to join the team because “you are the one who would actually be crazy enough to move to Madeira”
• “Safe return doubtful”: the Shackleton ad as a model for SovEng recruitment. No pay, no wages, but glory. Read Endurance by Alfred Lansing.
• High barrier to entry, no option to leave, “in it for the right reasons” – the SovEng filter
• “Make the internet a better place.” The actual mission statement.
• Demoing on Demo Day is not optional
• The Weekly Loop: Monday Movement, Tuesday Talks, Wednesday Workshops, Thursday time off, Friday Demo Day
• Nuns Valley – where the walks happen
• SEC-06 was about identity and signers. Agentic identity: spin up an nsec, now you can talk. The problem of identity in the age of OpenClaw.
• Fabian’s NIP-17 plugin for OpenClaw: Nostr DMs as a transport layer for agents
• Yo’s Zig NIP-17 plugin: building the same from scratch in Zig
• MLS, Pika, and pika for OpenClaw: encrypted group messaging for agent fleets
• The “social media intern” problem: you gave the keys to someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing
• Social attestation vs cryptographic proof: Yo’s combined approach where clients only display migration events and users decide out-of-band
• Gzuuus’s identity continuation proposal: simpler, no key management, just OTS timestamps and preimage commitments. Don’t migrate old notes, just continue
• Pip’s Vertex demo: purely social web-of-trust metrics already handle identity migration in practice
• “Identity is a social thing” – Vitor was right about that part
• PortalSDK & the portal team joining SEC-06: hardware signers meeting agentic identity
• Nostr, Blossom, nsites, Cashu – everything you need without permission
• “Permissionless, permissionless, permissionless” – we need a new Steve Ballmer
• SEC-06 was three weeks only. Learned that three weeks is not enough, just a warm-up. Minimum four, six is the sweet spot.
• But SEC-06’s energy spilled into SEC-07: first week was one of the most energetic ever, hit the ground running
• “The gray beards and the big brains actually came!”
• From Tollgate to NoDNS to fuckips to FIPS: the naming history of the Free Internetworking Peering System
• FIPS parties, not LAN parties: running on ESP32 radios, TCP, UDP, VPNs, Tor
• Jonathan came out of retirement, built FIPS from November to February, and now everyone’s building on top of it
• “DNS is a shitcoin” – direct quote from Jonathan
• Martti migrating Nostr VPN onto FIPS, Thomas showed a collaborative drawing board running on FIPS + Tor
• Quake III server running on FIPS
• nsites becoming the default deployment target for demos
• Blossom, nsites, NIP-60/61 – all came out of SovEng cohorts and are now in the wild
• BTC++ coming to Madeira after the summer cohort, first public demo day since SEC-01
• Tollgate on balloons: a gorilla Starlink, “we are all choked by the fiber optic cables”
• Rob’s silent payments over Nostr getting picked up by Sparrow: prototype gist
• L402 + nginx: Paygress – pay-per-request HTTP monetization
• “The most awesome thing is everyone has this project in the back of their head they always wanted to build. Once you’re at Sovereign Engineering, there’s no excuse.”
• Doom deployed on an nsite
• “After not shitcoining for so long, now I’m addicted to tokens.”
• “No Solutions, only trade-offs.”

People mentioned:

• Pablo (TENEX, Highlighter, SEC co-founder)
• Martti Malmi (Nostr VPN, migrating to FIPS)
• Paul (showed the vibe coding way at SEC-04)
• Calle (Cashu, live coding at SEC-04)
• Justin (browser, separate sessions for questions)
• Jonathan Corgan (FIPS creator, came out of retirement)
• Gzuuus (identity continuation proposal)
• Vitor Pamplona (social-only identity migration)
• Pip (Vertex, web-of-trust identity demo)
• Arjen (Tollgate, noDNS origins)
• Pete (Pete’s kid doing games on Nostr)
• Cobdorz (Tollgate on balloons)
• Sir Sleepy (multiple npub power user)
• Sandwich (nsites resurgence)
• Thomas (collaborative drawing board on FIPS + Tor)
• Rob (silent payments over Nostr, picked up by Sparrow)
• hodlbod (key rotation proposal)
• Ben from LNbits (hardware Nostr signer)
• Fabian (NIP-17 plugin for OpenClaw)

Projects & tech mentioned:

• FIPS (Free Internetworking Peering System)
• Sovereign Engineering (the program itself)
• OpenClaw / ZeroClaw (agent harnesses, rapid prototyping vs security trade-off)
• Codex (OpenAI’s coding agent)
• Routstr (model routing with Cashu payments)
• Tollgate (mesh network toll gates, now on balloons)
• Vertex (web-of-trust tools, identity migration demo)
• Nostr VPN (migrating to FIPS)
• nsites (Nostr-based web hosting, default demo deployment)
• Blossom (content-addressed blob storage)
• Cashu (eCash on Bitcoin)
• Nihao (skill for spinning up Nostr identities)
• Pika (MLS-based encrypted messaging for OpenClaw)
• Paygress (L402 nginx, pay-per-request HTTP monetization)
• Fabian’s NIP-17 plugin for OpenClaw
• NIP-17 plugin PR for nullclaw
• NIP-17 (encrypted DMs)
• NIP-29 (relay-based groups)
• NIP-60 / NIP-61 (Cashu wallets on Nostr)
• Amber (Android Nostr signer)
• Portal (hardware Nostr signer cards)
• Primal (signing abilities release)
• Sparrow (silent payments integration from Rob’s work)
• BPD5 (key management proposal)
• Endurance (Shackleton’s expedition, Alfred Lansing)
• BTC++ (coming to Madeira after summer cohort)

Recorded at 943,743.