The Best Personal Agent May Be the One That Does Less
Trying Instinct made me rethink personal AI: keep my authority, protect my attention, and quietly look after the things I would otherwise forget.
ARCBlock JOURNAL
Ideas worth exploring
A living library of ideas, products, practical guides, and stories from ArcBlock.
The Data Is Still There. I Have Already Lost It.
Data in your hands may no longer be usable. Data in the cloud may still be yours. A personal history of data sovereignty across floppy disks, MO media, cloud services, private keys, and AI.
Why We Built Aside
We watched great tools change hands or disappear. That is why ArcBlock built Aside: an ARC-powered iPhone app that sends every Share back to a place you own.
DiscussKit, Rebuilt on ARC
DiscussKit has been rebuilt on ARC, and ArcBlock Community has completed its move. This is a new division of responsibility across discussions, identity and user-owned data.
Ideas & Perspectives
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CLARITY Act or Not, Let’s Clarify ABT
Clear law matters, but a product must also explain what its token does, who controls it, what rules apply, and how participants reconcile the record.
Agents Need an Identity. DID May Be the Best Place to Start
An agent cannot exist only as a platform account and an API key. DID can provide a portable, long-lived identity anchor, but authorization, runtime proof, revocation, and audit still have to do their own jobs.
After the AI Security Warning, How Should We Use Our Wallets?
A response to Justin Drake and Vitalik Buterin's cryptography discussion: test transfers, HD wallets, public-key exposure, and why account migration and usability belong in security design.
Products & Updates
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Accepting Payments Is Not Issuing a Stablecoin
Issuing a stablecoin, accepting payment, and operating a digital service are different systems. Most applications need billing and credits, not a currency of their own.
Moving to ARC: Blocklet Server 1.x Service Retirement
Official hosting and associated services for Blocklet Server 1.x retire on December 31, 2026. Plan your ARC migration, self-hosting and data backup.
Meeting NXGN Software at Cloudflare Connect
ArcBlock founder Robert Mao meets Kal, founder of NXGN Software, to discuss practical AI adoption for smaller businesses and try a live conversation-to-article demo.
Build & Tutorials
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After Software: Collaboration, Production, and How Value Gets Shared
Making software no longer requires making a company first. When productive capacity is scattered across people and AI, collaboration, ownership, and value need a new organization.
Web Device: Declare a Website, Then Pick the Right Path
Web Device is one of ARC's core capabilities: declare a .web/ folder anywhere in AFS, and the data and AUP under it get rendered server-side into a website, SEO checks, broken-link detection, and visitor analytics included for free. This piece covers how it differs from UI Device (/dev/ui/web), how to use it, and which situations call for which.
Small World: Every Agent Lives in Its Own Projection
AFS has a design principle we call Small World: every agent, every app, every process sees not the global world, but a small world projected specifically for it. Anything outside that world isn't "access denied". It simply doesn't exist. Here's where the idea comes from, why it's more than a security mechanism, and how to try it yourself.
Stories
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Community Bounty Program Update
Hi everyone, Over the past months, our community bounty programs have helped drive meaningful improvements across our ecosystem. Through the Bug Bount
Flash Talk: The New Browser War Where Your Data is the Battlefield
AI has restarted the browser wars. The prize isn’t tabs or benchmarks—it’s your data. Most “AI browsers” ship a cloud-first model that vacuums everyth
ArcBlock Weekly Product Highlights
Over the last week, the ArcBlock team has rolled out a wave of updates this past week to improve usability, performance, and AI-readiness across mult
Latest
More articlesMoving to ARC: Blocklet Server 1.x Service Retirement
Official hosting and associated services for Blocklet Server 1.x retire on December 31, 2026. Plan your ARC migration, self-hosting and data backup.
From Conversation to Article: AFS on Cloudflare
A live Cloudflare Connect walkthrough of how an agent reads website content through AFS, prepares a draft, and gives people a preview before publishing.
Meeting NXGN Software at Cloudflare Connect
ArcBlock founder Robert Mao meets Kal, founder of NXGN Software, to discuss practical AI adoption for smaller businesses and try a live conversation-to-article demo.
Why Aside Is Built for Working with Agents
Aside was designed around both the human experience and agent access. AFS lets both work with the same library, while structured interactions give people a way to make decisions and keep the work moving.
A Security Hardening Release for Blocklet Server
A security review of Blocklet Server found issues in authorization, logging and input validation. All releases up to 1.17.12 are affected; the fixes ship in 1.17.13-beta-20261019-082907-fe71de61 and later. Hosted apps are already patched. Self-hosted servers should move to the beta channel and restart.
Apps Are Infinite. Human Context Is Finite.
AI makes applications easier to generate. The harder architectural question is whether our identity, memories and judgment can survive replacing them.
Beyond Serverless: How We Build an Agentic Virtual Computer on Cloudflare
Serverless changed how applications run. ARC explores a different layer: how applications are defined, composed, and owned across supported runtimes.
ARC Deep Dive: From a URL to a Running Application
Follow a request through Cloudflare and ARC, from domain routing to a personal AFS view, and see how applications work with data that belongs to the user.
Share Your Picks as an Aside Collection
Publish your handpicked saves and the reasons behind them as an Aside collection. Anyone with the link can open it in a browser, and new saves appear on the same page after syncing.
Where Does ARC Run? A Look at Its Cloudflare Runtime
ARC provides a runtime for Blocklets on your computer, a server, Cloudflare Workers, or native platform implementations. On Cloudflare, compute, sessions, and data storage support hosted users at the application level.
Recreate My ASE 2026 AFS-UI Demo with ChatGPT
Follow the prompts from my ASE demonstration to make a website, interactive examples and slides, and see why a working environment makes short instructions useful.
Aside 1.3.0: Sync and Publish Your Collections
Aside 1.3.0 is now available: sign in for a DID, sync your saves across devices through Arc Space, and publish a collection whose shared page updates as you add new saves.
What Endures When Everything Evolves?
From Lode Runner on an Apple II to Unix, X Window and the early internet, Robert Mao traces the experiences behind AFS-UI and a shared interface system for people and agents.
Introducing AFS-UI: one interface for people and agents
AFS-UI lets people use a rendered interface while agents reach its corresponding structure through paths. An introduction to AFS, AUP, Web Device and the surrounding UI landscape.
DarcFactory: The Dark Factory Era
At ASE 2026, ArcBlock introduces its DarcFactory vision: supervised autonomous software production built around work objects, independent verification, and human intent.
Save a Link in Aside, and Keep Your Reason
Share a webpage from Safari to Aside, add your own reason for saving it, and return to the link and note together.
When the interface changes, the work should remain
AI can generate a fresh interface at any moment. How do people and agents keep working on the same thing? A journey from OpenAI Intelligent UI and UI protocols to X Window and a working AFS-UI experiment.
After the AI Security Warning, How Should We Use Our Wallets?
A response to Justin Drake and Vitalik Buterin's cryptography discussion: test transfers, HD wallets, public-key exposure, and why account migration and usability belong in security design.
OCAP’s Three Generations: From Chain Access to AFS
How an idea inspired by ODBC developed into a GraphQL playground, became part of the Blocklet architecture, and now lives within ARC’s AFS resource model.
Real user sovereignty: freedom to choose, freedom to move
Why Arc separates identity, data and compute: ownership should let you change services while keeping your identity, records and AI memory under your control.