GoKawiilMario and Earendil
Today I’m very happy to share that Mario Zechner is joining Earendil.
First things first: I think you should read Mario’s post. This is his news more than it is ours, and he tells his side of it better than I could. What I want to do here is add a more personal note about why this matters so much to me, how the last months led us here, and why I am so excited to have him on board.
Last year changed the way many of us thought about software. It certainly changed the way I did. I spent much of 2025 building, probing, and questioning how to build software, and in many more ways what I want to do. If you are a regular reader of this blog you were along for the ride. I wrote a lot, experimented a lot, and tried to get a better sense for what these systems can actually do and what kinds of companies make sense to build around them. There was, and continues to be, a lot of excitement in the air, but also a lot of noise. It has become clear to me that it’s not a question of whether AI systems can be useful but what kind of software and human-machine interactions we want to bring into the world with them.
That is one of the reasons I have been so drawn to Mario’s work and approaches.
Pi is, in my opinion, one of the most thoughtful coding agents and agent infrastructure libraries in this space. Not because it is trying to be the loudest or the fastest, but because it is clearly built by someone who cares deeply about software quality, taste, extensibility, and design. In a moment where much of the industry is racing to ship ever more quickly, often at the cost of coherence and craft, Mario kept insisting on making something solid. That matters to me a great deal.
I have known Mario for a long time, and one of the things I admire most about him is that he does not confuse velocity with progress. He has a strong sense for what good tools should feel like. He cares about details. He cares about whether something is well made. And he cares about building in a way that can last. Mario has been running Pi in a rather unusual way. He exerts back-pressure on the issue tracker and the pull requests through OSS vacations and other means.
The last year has also made something else clearer to me: these systems are not only exciting, they are also capable of producing a great deal of damage. Sometimes that damage is obvious; sometimes it looks like low-grade degradation everywhere at once. More slop, more noise, more disingenuous emails in my inbox. There is a version of this future that makes people more distracted, more alienated, and less careful with one another.
That is not a future I want to help build.
At Earendil, Colin and I have been trying to think very carefully about what a different path might look like. That is a big part of what led us to Lefos.
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