18: Rewriting TENEX w/ Pablo

April 1, 2026 · 46 min

About this episode

Gigi and Pablo discuss the complexities of rewriting TENEX and the implications of multi-agent coordination in technology.

"You're yelling at someone who is lying to you." Pablo & Gigi take a drive. Recorded December 2025. Listen on sovereignengineering.io Projects & tech mentioned: TENEX (multi-agent coordination on Nostr) NDK (Nostr Development Kit) NDK Swift & NDK Kotlin (native ports of NDK, vibe-coded) nostrdb (embedded Nostr database) Negentropy / NIP-77 (efficient event sync) NIP-60 (Cashu wallets on Nostr) Vercel AI SDK (multi-provider LLM abstraction) Notedeck & Nostur Olas (rebuilt with TENEX agents) In this dialogue: Bitcoiners in cars getting coffee: recording from the sun visor, Seinfeld style TENEX rewritten "about a hundred times," now in TypeScript on Vercel AI SDK The pain of supporting every LLM provider: Gemini returns encrypted reasoning tokens, every API has different subtleties Removing structure to improve performance: deleting 80% of agent code makes agents work better Agents defining their own workflow phases instead of having phases imposed on them Composable workflows: the CEO agent doesn't need to know what the engineering director's workflow looks like The parallel to human organizations: you can't hold all the information in your own mind John Vervaeke…

People in this episode

Host: Gigi

Guest: Pablo

Topics covered

multi-agent coordination
Nostr development
workflow optimization
Bitcoin usage
AI SDKs
dialogue in problem-solving

Keywords

TENEX
Nostr
multi-agent coordination
Vercel AI SDK
Bitcoin
workflow phases
participatory knowing

Mentioned in this episode

Products: TENEX, NDK, NDK Swift, NDK Kotlin, nostrdb, Negentropy, NIP-77, NIP-60, Vercel AI SDK, Notedeck

Books & works: Bitcoiners in cars getting coffee