Gordon Brander on Living Software Ecosystems

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Gordon Brander spent years building browsers at Mozilla and Google. Now he’s building Deep Future, a scenario planning AI, and exploring multi-agent systems.

His obsession: understanding what makes software ecosystems open-ended and evolving.

The Pattern Library

Brander’s personal site hosts 165+ interconnected notes on systems thinking. These aren’t blog posts — they’re atomic ideas he links together:

Each note is tagged by theme: systems, evolution, strategy, tools. It’s a public working memory.

Squishy Computer Newsletter

His newsletter Squishy Computer reaches 7,000+ subscribers. The thesis:

“I’m interested in software ecosystems that are organic, open-ended, and evolving. The internet is like this, and so is the web. My question is, how can we make more software like this?”

He approaches software through evolution and ecology metaphors. Living systems that surprise themselves.

The Core Insight

From Brander’s homepage:

“Open-ended ecosystems are where value is created. The value comes from the system surprising itself.”

This shapes everything he builds. Not controlled systems, but ones that evolve beyond their creator’s vision.

Principles from His Notes

Tools shape thought. His “brick pencil” note makes this concrete — you can’t write the same ideas with a brick as with a pencil. Tools define what’s thinkable.

Systems are counterintuitive. Brander collects patterns about how complex systems fail, how interventions backfire, how emergence happens where you don’t expect it.

Civilization advances by abstraction. Quoting Whitehead: “Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations we can perform without thinking about them.”

Background

Try This

  1. Read through his notes collection — it’s a masterclass in atomic note-taking
  2. Subscribe to Squishy Computer for essays on living software
  3. Follow his work on multi-agent systems at Deep Future