ODUM

As can be seen from the other posts on this site, I’ve invested a lot of time into Janet. And frankly, I consider it the best time spent in my professional career so far.

While working on the first incarnation of my application framework, a set of new — and at the time somewhat strange — ideas began to form. None of them was unheard of on their own, but together they created a new mental constellation. I called it On Demand User Machines.

The core idea was simple: we don’t need a single huge server, but rather many small applications. Data doesn’t need to be siloed in one central database; it can live locally, close to the machines that actually use it.

Further

I rewrote the framework again and again, trying to achieve this goal — and, to be honest, also trying to keep up with the rapid development of the Janet language itself. I built a task and time-tracking application. I wrote a static site generator (which produces the pages you’re reading now). I even wrote a conference paper.

But it still wasn’t it.

It was more like a shadow of what was coming (and yes, without a touch of messianic humor, no post seems complete these days).

For almost two years I struggled. I abandoned the idea more than once — yet it kept pulling me back. Then, in the spring of 2025, while teaching, my students convinced me that LLMs were finally usable. I subscribed to the biggest one available at the time and started debating my ideas with it.

To my surprise, it was extremely productive.

Within a few weeks, I had a flourishing project that absorbed nearly five years of accumulated thinking. But instead of ending up with a simple framework and guide, I arrived at something broader: a general model of modern web application development. At that point, the original name no longer made sense.

Enter the thickets

With LLM assistance, the model that emerged felt distinctly organic. There were groups of cooperating machines, a Demiurge responsible for creating new ones, and data stored in Trees. The original engineering-style naming no longer fit.

After a lot of brainstorming, a new name appeared:

Thicket Web Mind.

The basic organizational unit is the Thicket, which must contain at least one Symbiont or Tree. Inside a Thicket, everything is connected through the Mycelium. Communication with other Thickets and with the outside world happens via the Membrane.

With this structure in place, new paradigms naturally began to emerge. Symbionts directly used by humans are called Avatars. Authentication is delegated to the Sentry — a deliberately simple Symbiont whose only job is to verify credentials and start the machine it guards.

There are many more concepts like this, but you probably get the picture.

Finale

This is the first post in what I hope will become a long series documenting my research and its ongoing development. If this resonates with you, feel free to check back from time to time.