Ajar Sourced

March 23, 2026 ·

Do you like bugs? I close-sourced the repository for this website last weekend and ran into a bug I couldn't immediately trace back to the decision. GitHub gave me lots of warnings about making the repo private: it could break things, da da da. I couldn't think of anything that'd break; also this is just a tiny personal website, so what if it did.

I have a way to post on the go and a way to edit on the go, but I realized yesterday I couldn't edit my posts any longer. The sky didn't fall, I had multiple ways to edit, but it didn't immediately occur to me that my decision to privatize the repository caused it. Only once I got an AI to debug did it reveal that the edit app was trying to access the repo but not longer could. Everything added up.

I referenced protocol fights about agentic commerce yesterday which on surface are about this open and closed topic. Do open systems always win, or is that just an engineer's fantasy? Conversely, are closed systems truly closed?

I'll have to think more on this, but currently I most like being ajar sourced. Not fully open, not fully closed. But a secret third thing: leaving repository doors ajar.