A letter to tech CEOs

Theo (t3.gg) argues open source is the only viable business strategy in the AI era, proposing a ‘patch.md’ concept for self-healing forks.

• T3 Code has 1,500 forks against ~16K weekly active users — roughly 10% of users have customized the codebase via fork.
• libGhosty (the terminal-binding library powering Ghosty) hit multiple million daily users in 2 months; Ghosty itself took 18 months to reach 1 million.
• Mitchell Hashimoto’s ‘building block economy’ thesis: AI agents actively prefer open, npm-installable components over closed commercial alternatives — independent research confirms models choose OSS under diverse conditions.
• Theo’s ‘patch.md’ proposal: encode the intent of every fork customization in a plain-text file so an agent can reapply changes automatically when the upstream ships breaking updates.
• The moat of legacy SaaS (Salesforce, Retool) is 1,000 features where any given customer uses ~50 — AI collapses this by letting non-devs fork and self-serve the missing 1% features instead of staying locked in.
• Security risk is real: Cal.com is being hammered with exploit attempts at volume because it is open source; this is why T3 Chat has not been open-sourced yet despite team pressure.
• Theo’s investment thesis is explicitly built on this: ‘if I’m wrong, my kids don’t get college money’ — he is advising all portfolio companies to go all-in on open source now.

2026-04-15 · Watch on YouTube