Jason

Escape Hatches

I always loved drawing and designing and I've always been a nerd. When I was 14 I entered a logo design competition run by the local government recreation centre. I won, and you know what I did with the AU$200 prize (about $800 today)? I bought a Commodore 64. I spent so many hours on that thing, it was an escape hatch.

I learned BASIC but that wasn't enough. Mesmerised by the idea that a computer screen could look like a desktop, I bought a book and wrote assembly language code to create a mouse arrow on the screen and moved it about using a joystick. I never finished the graphical operating system, and GEOS eventually arrived. Games were never my thing, but I loved solving problems and the satisfaction of creation.

By the time I got to university there were entire rooms filled with much more sophisticated computers, but I was too busying with student life and learning mathematics, physics and engineering. After I started my PhD I expanded the focus to include computer simulation. Double the work but maybe a little more employable? So I dived back into computing. Only now it was all linux and networking and a whole alphabet of languages.

I dabbled in many of them. The open source ethos permeated the DIY culture of a university department working on a shoestring. I loved the freedom and independence of the open source escape hatch. When I finished and moved on, it wasn't to the US space career I'd once imagined, but to sleepy Perth, Western Australian where no one really knew what to do with a PhD graduate in aerospace and mechanical engineering. And I was never really good at working for someone else. I had software and I knew, somehow, it could lead somewhere. My main project had become my kids, and I tried my hand at day trading but was relieved to emerge the shirt on my back after a couple of roller coaster years.

I also came out with a custom Java library to back-test trading strategies, and started thinking about software as a way to solve bigger problems, not just my employment dilemma. I felt guilty about using (Limewire)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LimeWire) and BitTorrent, and thought downloaders should be able to easily donate directly to creators. Finding plenty of holes in that idea, the scope gradually expanded into Oxegen. The basic idea: the internet couldn't be fair and honest unless it had a new layer.

Coding was hard enough but a side project on my own with an improbable goal, that was tough and mostly on my bread-winning wife who wasn't seeing anything come from all the talk. The truth is I didn't really know what I was doing and struggled to maintain momentum in between domestic duties. The vision and the planning improved yet I had spun my wheels rewriting code in Go, and thought the same might be happening when I learned Rust and developed the Hematite library. As my kids became teenagers time freed up and things were looking on the up. Then something happened, and I had no idea how it would change my life.

ChatGPT launched in late 2022 and I signed up in the first week. Claude launched a few months later and I always preferred it. Claude Code came out in early 2025 and Opus 4 dropped a few months after that. Like many others I had been grappling with how to use this new fangled gizmo, bumping into problems and limitations, but by Opus 4 it was like having a team of assistants. By mid 2026 I was confident enough to let Opus 4.6 and 4.8 write and commit Hematite code according to strict guidelines. The traction has been incredible. So I'm making hay while the sun shines, building escape hatches to share with others.

I hope for Oxegen to be a breath of fresh air online, a place of authenticity where fakery, fraud and the AI that will amplify it can be better contained. Oxedyne is named partly because of its role in Oxegen, but also because I wanted to help "oxidise the world" and help with spread the virtues of Rust.

Ironically, I haven't hand-written a line of Rust or HTML, CSS or Javascript for months now, and I don't miss it (yet). I specify and verify and can now focus on entire projects instead of just blocks of code. I know there is a darker side to AI, and I've written a book about it, coming soon, but I want to be open and honest and transparent, to allow others to make their own judgements. AI is going to cause us problems, but the escape hatches can only be built by flesh and blood humans, and Oxedyne will play its part.