This is the first post on this blog, so I’ll start with the question I get asked the most: why did I build Bloks?
The honest answer is that I was inspired by two things, OpenClaw and Grok Bot.
It started with OpenClaw
When OpenClaw first came out I went all the way down the rabbit hole. I used it a lot, and pretty quickly I understood what the commercial version of it would look like.
Then, as agents kept getting more capable, Grok Bot was announced. I used it for a day or two and it made something very clear to me: being locked into one vendor sucks. With OpenClaw I could pick whatever model I wanted, and that was a big part of what made it fun. With Grok Bot I couldn’t.
So I decided to build it for myself. A secure version of Grok Bot that was as capable as OpenClaw, living on my own machine, not locked into any one company, and running on the subscriptions and API keys I already had. And I wanted to build out my own team with it, not just talk to one bot.
It had to be in people’s hands
I’d never put a project’s code out in public before. But I knew this one had to be in the hands of the people using it, and I knew it needed a phone app to go with it.
I priced Bloks Cloud, the relay that lets your phone reach the agents on your computer, at $5 a month. That leaves me little to no margin, and that’s on purpose. Revenue was never the point of this project. I wanted something for the people: something me and a group of people in the dev community could work on together, keep making better for ourselves, and use to compete with the giants with something of our own.
A hundred stars
Bloks hit 100 stars on GitHub on 28 September. That was an amazing feeling. I honestly never thought something I launched would get real momentum. Now there are 294, and I see people on Twitter talking about it, which still doesn’t feel real. It makes me want to keep building and keep pushing what it can do.
Why design matters so much to me
I truly believe a great UI with capable agents behind it is what makes Bloks stand out. I have an obsession with good design, if I do say so myself, and it’s what I wanted in the app from day one.
Running a team of agents through a cluttered, badly designed app is something you try once, get overwhelmed by, and give up on. That’s kind of how it was for me with OpenClaw: it was overwhelming to set up, and it felt very technical. Those were the things I knew we had to avoid if we wanted an everyday person running a business to use it.
The heavily animated bots Grok Bot launched with were great for marketing, but distracting to actually work with. So I went with little pixel bots instead, and kept enough customization for the people who want it. Most people just want the thing to work.
The people building it with me
I couldn’t have got here alone, and a lot of what’s good about Bloks came from people who didn’t have to help and did anyway.
@rpavlovs has landed more than a hundred commits, from Esc to stop an agent to a Telegram bot per agent and several accounts per engine. If Bloks has a second maintainer, it’s him. @po-trottier has filed 49 issues and landed several servers in one app and self-hosted mode. @grantterra chased a silent Windows crash all the way into Chromium and then sent ten pull requests in a day to fix it. @pycckuu and @alexnayko send the kind of bug reports that fix things I couldn’t even reproduce. @jrhorne made pairing work over Tailscale and gave OpenCode a workspace of its own. @LandonSchropp’s design notes shaped all of 2.5, and @ashottonoyan found and reported a security bug that we fixed in 3.0.
And to the people who sent fixes when Bloks was days old and rough around the edges, @millson1, @0xr3ngar, @makerxyz, @carlmumford and everyone after them: thank you. I read every issue and I reply to every one, and that’s not going to change.
What’s next
For the next phase, I’m focused on fewer walls of text. I want agents to answer with generative UI: things you can read at a glance, that look good, that you can actually interact with. A chart, a checklist, a decision with its options laid out, instead of five paragraphs. That’s what I think makes working with a team of agents feel good every day.
Android is on its way too. And Bloks stays free on your own machine with your own keys.
Not my last
Bloks may be my first project, but it won’t be my last. One of the best parts of all this has been the relationships I’ve formed with everyone working on Bloks.
I have more ideas and products to launch, and for the most part they’ll all be open source. We’re in a new time where everything should be open, and it’s something I’m starting to care about deeply. Having people know me from Bloks will help my other ideas reach bigger audiences too. Building my name in the AI dev community through Bloks is everything I could have asked for.
If you’re curious about my opinions, my other projects or announcements, follow me on Twitter at @hamedtweets and on GitHub at hamedgitty. I still haven’t mustered up the courage to do the whole YouTube thing. It’ll probably take some convincing from you guys.
Come hang out
A Bloks member, @razva, recently helped me set up a Discord server, and I’d love to grow the community there. Join up and let’s all discuss: discord.gg/FhV3SuGYfS
If you’re new here, download it and hire your first agent. It takes a minute, and it runs on the AI you already have. If you’ve been here since the start, thank you. Let’s keep building.
Hamed