For the last 3 years I have been building Bike4Mind and now I have to put my big boy pants on and 'go to market'. Ugh, it would be so much more cozy to fire up a few more agents and fix a few more bugs, polish some more UX - or hey how about a new feature that does Q, R or S?
What is Bike4Mind? I started Bike4Mind to be the home of a bunch of AI augmented game development tools, and over time have just kept adding features. It is a full cognitive workbench we have all of the features - notebooks, files, data lakes & RAG, agents (different forms), generate share-able artifacts in react or python. We have secure websockets to connect to our CLI - B4M CLI, so it is truly batteries included - and runs any model - OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, xAI, Bedrock. Switch models during a conversation, fork a notebook, run 4 different models on the same prompt, loads of image generation support, and import OpenAI and Anthropic history and of course egress with your own at any time.
So, all of the models and all the features. Sure, but so what?
We are huge believers in infrastructure as code and leveraged SSTv4, and Bike4Mind is able to 100% self-host on your own hardware. You can run Qwen locally and have all of the GUI and CLI and be totally offline from the internet.
The most complete fully-sovereign workbench I've found - and if you know a more complete one I'd genuinely like to see it.
Okay, so all of the models, features and I can self host - sounds cool, but why don't I vibe that up myself in Fable or such right?
We have used this with our enterprise clients over the last 3 years and so you also get all of the Enterprise SaaS stuff - batteries included - multi-tenant, RBAC, MFA, throttling, moderation, analytics, premium subscriptions, credits, heck even a slim CRM is built in! OAuth, github, google docs, notion, etc etc… it is one thing to lick the cupcake and get that MVP up and running and working for you - it is a totally different beast putting something that you can deploy for an enterprise.
What? What are you doing exactly?
48 hours ago (July 5th noon Austin) we took everything we built and we made it open with the most progressive license I could lay out: Source immediately under a BSL 1.1 license with a one-way ratchet where after 24 months each release converts to full Apache-2.0. Please appreciate that this is an irrevocable, one-way ratchet where Bike4Mind just gets more open with each release and each month. This is not a "Hey we are open source until well cough reasons - jazz hands we are closed - thanks for all of the PRs!"
To be clear, I know that source-available is not the same as open-source. But check out our actual license and the marketing site - we encourage and permit anyone to fork and create new products and sell them, or take the whole thing and self-host on their own AWS account or their own hardware. You can also fork it and customize a full stack AI solution for your own clients.
Really the only thing we are holding back - and just over 24 months - is not allowing people to stand up a vanilla copy of Bike4Mind and compete with B4M-as-a-service or change the name and do the same.
erikbethke•1h ago
Love AI. But, here is where I get a bit "woo-woo". I am not an AI doomer, I am fundamentally an optimist - but I do not think we are entitled to good future light-cones. I think we need agency and create those good future light cones.
I do not want to see a future where only a handful of leading labs and the hyperscalers run a cartel on intelligence. I do not want to live in a world with 'trickle-down' intelligence. I do not want to live in a world where we are scrambling to rent 'economically competitive augmentation'. I want to live in a post-scarcity, solar punk world.
And so I offer Bike4Mind. Hopefully, with utmost respect and humbleness, this is useful to you. I truly want you and everyone else to have sovereignty over their own AI. All of the major labs and all of the hyper scalers are working hard and fast to pull you into their walled gardens. And then like Pink Floyd's: "Mama's gonna keep baby cosy and warm", make it so much more comfortable to stay locked in where they have their fingers laced through your data and through your workflows.
Check out our source code and inspect it, fork it and run it yourself on your own hardware or in your AWS account. Or give it a spin, we have ~$10 of usage in credits - not a free tier, just a confirm with a real email address, or perhaps subscribe for $30 if you are so inclined, our credits roll-over for 90 days. Again, I cannot think of a way we could be more correct and kind.
How does our business work - how do we make money? Serial entrepreneur here - have founded a bunch of game companies and even had two decent exits. I have raised 13 venture rounds in my career. Bike4Mind is special, this one I have bootstrapped, and we have zero investors and we are profitable and growing. We make our money by working hard for our enterprise clients and surprising and delighting them. We are also building our own products (on B4M!) and hope to see those grow and flourish. With absolutely no shade cast on open-source community projects - we are a real, healthy business and we use B4M to do our "day job" and so building and expanding B4M is aligned to our core work. We were blown away and got two community PRs in the first 9 hours from people we never met - so cool - but B4M is not reliant on open sourced labor. And on the other side, we have no investor, we do not have a preference stack, we do not have a free tier and we are not burning capital and not chasing any vanity metrics in order to fund the next round. We are not pressured into unnatural acts. This is the most fun and interesting way we could build!