people of pi (durable). i did a round of performance optimizations in pi-durable.
quick primer. every step of an agent run is saved to a db before the agent moves on. 1 save = 1 commit. thats what makes it durable, crash mid run, resume from the last commit. ~12 commits per run
These new models are pretty crazy. In an afternoon (mostly passive) + one flight I built an IDE for Python for iOS that runs Pyodide, has a debugger, embeds linter and formatter, pi-durable powered coding agent and does iCloud Drive and all the other things too.
time and time again i fall into the trap of designing a big piece of infra with an agent, only to find out that my context window is smaller than the agent's.
i keep forgetting things that were already discussed, while clanker mcclankerface knows all the things.
A new paper from Apple engineers ends with a line we couldn’t have written better ourselves:
"if idle macOS devices across organizations [...] can be securely federated, they could form a massive, shared GPU resource pool that benefits the broader ecosystem."
That’s what we’re building with Darkbloom.
The paper's Minions is a system that pool idle Apple Silicon Macs into a distributed GPU cloud for on-prem inference. Queue times went from 10+ hours to minutes. Zero new GPU purchases. Zero infrastructure cost.
It runs inside Apple, on coworkers’ Macs, using the company’s own storage and access controls. When a team needs more capacity, they Slack colleagues and ask them to turn on the executor. Even in that setting, the top adoption concern was data confidentiality. People were wary of their jobs running on a colleague’s Mac. Apple’s fix was to keep each team’s work on its own team’s machines.
Which brings it back to that one word in the conclusion: “securely.”
Inside a company, you can shrink the network until you trust everyone in it. On an open network, the machine belongs to a stranger and there’s no one to Slack. Keeping prompts private and outputs honest on hardware you don’t control is the hard problem that we solved at Darkbloom.
Apple built the on-prem version.
Darkbloom is the open one.