obeavs

What an abysmal series of top comments. These guys created a phenomenal product using novel technology, which will only continue to improve. Great work to the Zed team.

Sure. Would contextualize by saying that infrastructure is a financial product: climate/industrial projects are sited in the physical world and have a hard upfront cost to produce a long term stream of cash flows, which, from a finance perspective, makes it look a lot like debt (e.g. I pay par value in order to achieve [x] cash flows with [y] risk).

When you drive past a solar project on the side of the road, you see the solar technology producing energy. But in order for a bank to fund $100M to construct the project, it has to be "developed" as if it were a long-term financial product across 15 or so major agreements (power offtake, lease agreement, property tax negotiations, etc). The fragmentation of tools and context among all the various counterparties involved to pull this sort of thing together into a creditworthy package for funding is enormously inefficient and as a result, processes which should be parallelize-able can't be parallelized, creating large amounts of risk into the project development process.

While all kinds of asset class-specific tools exist for solar or real estate or whatever, most of them are extremely limited in function because almost of those things abstract down into a narrative that you're communicating to a given party at any given time (including your own investment committee), and a vast swath of factual information represented by deterministic financial calculations and hundreds if not thousands of pages of legal documentation.

We build technology to centralize/coordinate/version control these workflows in order to unlock an order of magnitude more efficiency across that entire process in its totality. But instead of selling software, we sell those development + financing outcomes (which is where _all_ of the value is in this space), because we're actually able to scale that work far more effectively than anyone else right now.

So, we've been down this rabbithole at Phosphor (phosphor.co) and have explored/made a couple of really big technology bets on it.

The most unique/useful applications of it in production are based on combining dependent types with database/graph queries as a means. This enables you to take something like RDF which is neat in a lot of ways but has a lot of limitations, add typing and logic to the queries, in order to generally reimagine how you think about querying databases.

For those interested in exploring this space from a "I'd like to build something real with this", I'd strongly recommend checking out TypeDB (typedb.com). It's been in development for about a decade, is faster than MongoDB for vast swaths of things, and is one of the most ergonomic frameworks we've found to designing complex data applications (Phosphor's core is similar in many ways to Palantir's ontology concept). We went into it assuming that we were exploring a brand new technology, and have found it to work pretty comprehensively for all kinds of production settings.

Phosphor | NYC/Remote | Full Time | Founding Engineer | $150-225k + Equity

Phosphor builds recursively self-improving systems (via malleable software and natural language interfaces) to enable the efficient development and financing of the physical world (infrastructure, energy, real estate).

Our product is built around a powerful object model which combines document editors with proprietary programming languages for financial modeling, computable contracts, etc, in order to build one of the more unique RLHF feedback loops that we've seen to date.

A primary technical bet is that if we can productize version control properly, we can capture annotated "diffs" of user information with user-validated annotations. By doing so, we create path-dependence, which enables us to specify system-level goals for agents to solve for.

Our product is similar a combination of Linear and Wolfram, with components and objects that enable advanced financial modeling, legal/regulatory analysis, and geospatial analysis of infrastructure development opportunities.

We're venture-backed by one of the best deeptech funds in the market and are hiring for roles spanning product engineers, CRDT wizards, and compiler/calculation engine leads.

Job listings can be found at the bottom of phosphor.co.

You can try Moonbit. It's extraordinarily well designed and compiles to highly optimized JS, WASM or even native

Thank you for bringing this up. This is profoundly true for big projects (toll roads/transport) and small infra projects (e.g. community solar). The length of time that it takes to develop things like this, combined with the turnover and the sheer amount of context that single developer has to have to be successful with it, is one of the driving forces in why development is such a difficult/risky business.

It's one of the most consequential problems imaginable to solve, particularly as the US begins to realize that we need to compete with decades of China's subsidized energy and industrialization/manufacturing capacity.

Taking it a level deeper, what most don't realize is that infrastructure is an asset class: before someone funds the construction of $100M of solar technology, a developer will spend 2-5 years developing 15 or so major commercial agreements that enable a lender/financier to take comfort that when they deploy such a large amount of cash, they'll achieve a target yield over 20+ years. Orchestrating these negotiations (with multiple "adversaries") into a single, successfully bankable project is remarkably difficult and compared to the talent needed, very few have the slightest clue how to do this successfully.

Our bet at Phosphor is that this is actually solvable by combining natural language interfaces with really sophisticated version control and programming languages that read like english for financial models and legal agreements, which enables program verification. This is a really hard technical challenge because version control like Git really doesn't work: you need to be able to synchronize multiple lenses of change sets where each lens/branch is a dynamic document that gets negotiated. Dynamically composable change sets all the way down.

We are definitely solving this at Phosphor (phosphor.co) and we're actively hiring for whoever is interested in working at the intersection of HCI, program verification, natural language interfaces and distributed systems.

Hey! This is really awesome. Do you intend to support analysis on redlining/tracked changes? That's where it would become very useful for my use cases.

Phosphor | NYC | Full Time | Founding Engineer (HCI focus) | $175-225k + Equity

Phosphor enables the development of the built world (e.g. from real estate to energy projects) to be managed agentically by building programming languages and observability primitives (like version control) on top of a hypergraph.

Our primary technical bet is that if you capture annotated "diffs" of user information with the appropriate annotation, you can create path-dependence to train AI models in an AlphaGo like context. By doing so, we achieve agentic experiences for markets that have never even had an opportunity to imagine what life would be like with basic observability.

Our product is similar a combination of Linear and Wolfram, with components and objects that enable advanced financial modeling, legal/regulatory analysis, and geospatial analysis of infrastructure development opportunities.

We're in stealth, but recently venture-backed by one of the best deeptech funds in the market. We're hiring for a few roles at the senior/staff levels: 1. HCI Engineer - You're a prosemirror wizard who probably follows Ink & Switch or the UCSB HCI lab on Twitter; front-end/rich-text/typescript focused; lots of architectural/sync engine work 2. Systems/Compiler Engineer - We design and build dev tools for languages we create that compile into various graph representations. These range from financial modeling calcs (which need to go very fast to support a seamless UX), to computable representations of legal agreements. Extra points if you've worked with hypergraphs. This in Rust but we're exploring a few other languages.

Email resume/linkedin/twitter to oliver@phosphor.co if you might fit somewhere in here, or if you've taken a credible attempt at building end-user programming tools.

We're probably one of the first to make a real tech bet on Loro. We inched our way into it, and plus or minus some edge cases, it is going very well so far.

Even on the edge cases, most of it just relates to what primitives are exposed in the API, and we've found the library's author to be highly engaged in creating solutions.

We've found it to be an incredibly well designed library.

Congratulations to the team!! I've been following for some time and love a good DX story.

I'd love to get some commentary from any active users on tradeoffs re: adopting tech like LiveView vs the community size and scale of JS land.

For example, JS land benefits massively from libraries like ProseMirror or even any of the more advanced CRDT libraries like Loro or Automerge. How about the AI story?

Is there a clear path to adopting this JS-based tech? Is it not needed? Would love to get a better understanding of the tradeoffs from folks who live in both worlds.

Worth nothing that the former lead dev of ReScript left to create a WASM-first language call Moonbit (https://www.moonbitlang.com/). The language design is awesome and corrects a lot of the corners that they just couldn't get around in OCAML. A touch early, but really well done.

Compiler is open source. We're not betting on it yet, but following closely. Rate of positive change and shipping is really something to see.

Well, I made a large, multi-year company/technology bet on top of F# with Phosphor.

After over a year of trying to make it work, we completely rewrote the application in Typescript and Rust. The product we're building is an end-user programming tool where the traditional lines between front-end and back-end work blur, and the .NET ecosystem really didn't lend itself well to this.

Our hope was that we'd be able to use the Fable library to maintain type safety across a variety of technologies while being able to interop and in and out as needed: Fable compiles F# code to JS, Rust, .NET, etc. The reality was that the interop story between the various libraries we'd use was much harder to achieve than initially expected, and managing and updating multiple dependencies and their bindings was an absolute PITA.

The assumption that F# makes for beautiful, efficient code is still a safe one, I think. But the ecosystem and the way that it was designed makes it (in my view) applicable only for applications and software that have very traditional frontend/backend lines. F# would be used for the back-end only in that case.

Today, two of the technologies I'm most excited by (and which we're using internally) are the Effect library, whose Schema library fills in a lot of the gaps in TS's type system, and Moonbit, which is what I imagine a modern version of F# would like, free of the MS/.NET dependencies. Moonbit is really, really well designed (designed by the creator of OCAML's version of Fable, ReScript), and it compiles directly to highly optimized JS, WASM or Native output. We're using Effect in production, and not yet Moonbit, but the promise Moonbit holds as a language built for an AI-first world is pretty fantastic.

Great write up -- hadn't seen Perspective.

Would Perspective work for a similar use case as Causal's where the data tables have a large amount of interactivity, tree-based information and/or master-detail style UI concerns?

We're building a product that is more oriented around the interactive DAG concept and less about big data. The snappiness of those examples is very impressive.

If you did it again, would you use AG-Grid, or would seek to own the table with something like Tanstack Table?

Nice work! What was the hardest technological part about building the product?

Gitbutler is ridiculously cool and well considered. Definitely worth checking out.

Hands down, the best (free, no email) resource to learn Effect is here https://www.typeonce.dev/course/effect-beginners-complete-ge..., as opposed to the docs. The link referenced gives a holistic view of how to incorporate it.

Yep. Effect is so cool. The ability encode AND decode is tomorrow's standard.

With all the work they're doing on durable workflows, hard to imagine that 2025 is anyone else's year.

Wow! Really awesome local-first work on a modern stack. Would love to know more about your experience with Glide and Lexical.

Would be curious to hear any feedback from folks using Grain.

I've been following a similar WASM-first language, Moonbit (https://www.moonbitlang.com/), which was created by the creator of Rescript. I'm excited by the design decisions they've made and think there is a lot of promise on the AI story for these fully typed "low resource" functional languages due to their expressiveness. My bet is that coding agents will start to really benefit from the type inference they provide.

Hiring: CTO (to take reins from solo, technical founder)

PHOSPHOR (http://phosphor.co/20x) has been reverse-engineering ISDA, which financial historians refer to as “the greatest success story in modern economic history” due to ISDA's ability to drive standardization into financial contracts which enabled their markets to grow 1200x.

We're doing this in the internet age by modeling Github as the center of the open source world. But to build something like Github, we had to build languages, version control, IDEs, and infrastructure for contracts and financial models (the backbones of every asset class in finance) to make them computable and connectable.

I've been building Phosphor for over three years as both CEO and CTO. As we've really honed in on what we're doing as a business, how/where we innovate, etc, I need someone experienced to take the reins and help me grow this company into the ridiculous opportunity it represents.

You might be a fit if: - You're demonstrably obsessed with HCI and end-user computing - You’ve lost sleep thinking about knowledge abstraction problems - You’ve built CRDTs and collaborative applications for fun - You're design-oriented, but as speed is a UX problem, you’ve learned systems languages - You’re excited by the emergence that occurs when AI is applied against observable systems - You're excited to - You’re a polyglot, and maybe frustrated that functional languages aren’t the norm - You have an expansive model of the world, and the idea of consolidating these skills to create extraordinary real-world impact excites you - You're deeply technical, but have also built capable teams

What you’ll do: - Build one of the most unique products in finance - Inherit a three year old, thoughtfully architected, event-driven application with only minor tech debt - Build a 5-10 person engineering team - Kick off/manage all of the bits and pieces that go into such a ridiculous endeavor

This is a very hard technical problem at every level (low level up through design) which we've made extraordinary progress towards.

We have traction and investment from leaders in clean energy finance (where I built one of the leading solar platforms as first hire), real estate, and more.

To apply, email oliver@phosphor.co with "CTO position" in the title. Include a PDF of your resume, links to LinkedIn/GH, and lay some bullets that point to awesome you've done or built before that match the bits and pieces of the "You might be a fit if" section.

Cheers.

We've had "fun" solving this for Phosphor which has similar parts to Causal, but is focused more on real assets and emphasizes connection with computable contracts.

For circularity, we found that we could keep the UX dynamic by making a deep copy of the circular part of the DAG behind the scenes, asking the user to determine which variable in that path should be "resolved", hard coding that variable in the copy, then solving that variable to zero through a newton optimization. Once optimized (in parallel to main graph), it feeds back into the main DAG just like any other dependency.

Would be a silly approach in Excel, but not so much here.

Use SQLite for everything, or Postgres if you outgrow it.

Or both! I've followed ElectricSQL for a while and it's pretty awesome to see how they've approached it. Rest APIs replaced with client side SQLlite which syncs to server side postgres over a CRDT layer that you don't actually have to touch/know anything about. And they just rebuilt postgres on pure WASM (https://github.com/electric-sql/pglite).

It's just cool to think that maybe you don't have to do design all of these intricate REST apis and just call SQL.

Our product (phosphor) is built end-to-end in F# so this stuff is close to my heart. You might find Moonbit's approach to functional AI interesting as well https://www.moonbitlang.com/blog/moonbit-ai.

Is the F# POC open source? Link?

For what it's worth, Moonbit (https://www.moonbitlang.com/) is a really nice take on this. Designed by the guys who created Rescript for OCAML, but for WASM-first world.

After reading James Nestor's Breath, I went through the Oxygen Advantage certification for fun. Lots of studies that show that the 4/6 or 5/5 cadence (ten second round trip, leading to six breaths a minute) strongly improves heart rate variability and engages the parasympathetic nervous system.

OP had a cool idea -- wish it hit the 5/5 cadence.

Smart play, but hard to do in the moment. Sounds like a sharp guy.

PHOSPHOR | Remote | New York, NY

Hiring: CTO, Staff/Senior UI Engineers, AI Engineer

Stack: Elm/React, Tailwind, F#, Rust, exploring local-first solutions

PHOSPHOR (http://phosphor.co/20x) has solved the last "impossible" technology problem in capital markets.

We've represented financial models AND contracts as structured, computable data, and we've done so without sacrificing flexibility afforded by Excel or Word. This has never been done, and it enables product opportunities that have never been conceivable before: we have the first real view towards AI that does not hallucinate in the most business critical mediums in finance.

I founded Phosphor after building one of the leading clean energy investment platforms in the US as first hire. Phosphor was originally a clean energy finance product, but then we solved a much deeper set of problems. Over three years, I've led three senior engineers as CEO/CTO while we've worked (in stealth) through mind-boggling R&D problems in computable contracts and linguistics.

As we focus on commercialization & launch over the next few months, I'm seeking senior product/UI engineers, and I'm beginning a CTO search in hopes of finding a senior technical leader to take the reigns and partner with me to build something OpenAI-scale.

For the adventurous of you, resumes to oliver@phosphor.co. Please mention HN in the subject line.