The second OATLUG

Two weeks after the first one, OATLUG came back to Pour Taproom on the Beltline. Six people, a row of laptops along the bar, Omarchy on every screen, and ninety minutes in which nobody discussed Linux in the abstract.

It opened with a card already left at the bar: say Omarchy, or any mangling of it, and your drink was covered.

Most of the night was demos, and most of the demos were plugins somebody in the room had written. Herdr, with sessions named after the project directory they live in, so you stop hunting for the right terminal. Alt and an arrow key moves between them, and that is the whole keymap anybody needs. Pulse, which began as separate CPU, disk and RAM monitors until somebody at the first meetup said put them in one. It now surfaces whichever component is currently your weakest link, and you drill in from there. Infomarchy, which is not a window at all. It paints onto the desktop itself, lists the agents actually running, and clicking one drops you into its session. Burn Bar for token spend across Claude, Codex, Grok and local. A Tailscale host monitor for every server, and the pitch that goes with it: free up to a hundred devices, and your workflow stops caring which house you are sitting in. Sonomarchy, which puts the Sonos speakers in the bar. Blip, which Tailscales home to a Mac Mini so iMessage works on Linux, everything except tapbacks. Omamail for Gmail. A Tesla plugin that locks the car, starts the climate and puts it on a map. The developer token is free, and the fleet tier is a thousand a month, which nobody needed. PR Hunter, which lists every project, flags the ones asking for help with their open-issue counts, and drops you into the herdr session for the one you pick. And btop in a Quake-style dropdown, which started an argument about whether you could point the same pattern at a business dashboard instead of a CPU. Most of them are listed at omarchy.nixfred.com.

The best stretch was not a demo. Somebody wanted a hotkey Omarchy does not ship, and the answer was: Omarchy will not rewrite your keybinds, so go tell your agent. They did it at the table, asked for SUPER+D to show the desktop, the agent found the binding, wrote it, and it worked before the next round arrived. The same argument covered a misplaced function key, caps lock remapped to control, and one person who swapped Alt and Super outright because he likes his thumb on that key. Installing software went the same way: let the agent do it, because there is always one more thing. When SUPER+I failed to hide Infomarchy mid-demo, the fix was the same sentence, sic an agent on it, and it got fixed at the bar.

That is the thesis somebody put into words later. The people most empowered by agents right now are not the best programmers. They are the ones with deep domain knowledge who could never quite write the code. An infrastructure person knows exactly what good looks like and has just been handed the ability to build it.

The evidence kept arriving all night. Smart shades from Hunter Douglas whose Bluetooth protocol got reverse-engineered, with the agent walking him through an Android emulator, pulling the keys, and landing it in Home Assistant. A Pokemon fan game rebuilt on an engine whose authors posted one last release in 2020 and walked away when Nintendo asked them to, now running with agent-drawn pixel art and every Pokemon replaced by the owner’s dogs. A sixty-page S-Corp return nobody could read, handed over with “read a year of my email and tell me what does not line up”, which came back with three things worth taking to the accountant. And the story of the night: arguing with a colleague at ten at night over whether a confirmation number counts as PII, conceding when he made the better argument, redacting the post, then finding out afterwards that the colleague had just switched on a PII scanner bot. “I was arguing with a bot at ten o’clock at night. And it was so natural.”

Somebody shipped their first plugin, and the reason is perfect. These screens and keyboards are fingerprint magnets, so it freezes the keyboard and the display long enough to wipe the machine down.

Trackpad Pulse drew the biggest reaction: clicks for the day, a heat map of where your hand actually goes, your acceleration curve, and a button that tunes the trackpad to how you already work. “Are you harvesting all my mouse movements?” Absolutely. Which set off the counter-story, a Dell engineer who spent twenty years on machine learning before it was fashionable and built firmware-level optimization out of mouse and keyboard telemetry. It worked, right until it left the CTO’s lab and became shipping Dell software. The plugin on the bar was the same idea, written by one person in a week.

A member’s game got played in the room and got the feedback you only get in person: the challenge flashes and is gone before you have read it. It teaches keyboard combinations by spaced repetition, Anki-style, with courses that get harder, badges at the end, and a course that drills only the ones you keep missing.

Then the hardware argument, which is what six Linux people at a bar are for. The whole Dell lineup was on the bar: 13, 14 and 15. OLED against IPS. Framework’s ethos against Framework’s execution and the RAM supply holding up its shipping. ThinkPad keyboards and the people loyal to them. Apple silicon: M1 and M2 disappointing for this, M3 and M4 looking better, and a VM if you only want to try Omarchy without committing a machine. Backups too, about ten dollars a month to Backblaze for every server, with the warning that they charge you on the way out, not on the way in.

One quiet thing worth recording. One of the six runs Four Technologies, the Atlanta fintech that became a Distinguished Corporate Patron of the Omacom Foundation last week, three hundred thousand dollars over three years, with the paperwork traded with DHH while he was in Greece. That announcement is sitting in this site’s own news workspace, pulled from omarchy.org’s feed. It was cut by somebody who was standing at this bar tonight.

Pizza arrived mid-demo, bought by somebody who would not take credit for it. Then everyone turned their screens to the Omarchy logo and took the photo at the top of this page.

In the room: @augman, @nixfred, @IshanShah, @jttraino, @JeremyJ26571080, @navindra404. The event itself is on Luma.

There will be a third one. Bring a laptop.