Here's what's about to blindside a lot of comfortable assumptions: an experienced developer in the Philippines with AI tools can now do in a week what used to take a funded Bay Area team a quarter.
That's not a feel-good story about global inclusion. That's a shockwave. The economics of building software just broke wide open, and most of the industry hasn't caught up yet.
We Know What We're Talking About
Cookiecutter downloads since 2013
We built it. We gave it away. Still free.
Monthly cost to deploy Air
Not $200. Not $50. Two dollars and fifty cents.
First PyCon Philippines
We were part of the team that started it all.
Proof
We led the first Air web framework sprint there. Sprinters were a mix of local developers and those traveling hours to get to Davao. Some were highly experienced, teaching us new things about data science and Kubernetes best practices. Some were students landing their first PR, needing encouragement like students anywhere. All of them had the technical skills, English fluency, and modern laptops needed for it. What they hadn't had was open source web framework creators in the room, pairing with them and encouraging them to be involved from the start.
The problem was never talent. It was access.
AI just handed every developer on earth the same leverage. What matters now is what we actually build with it, and whether it works well for everyone. We're building tools that make AI systems more accountable, more accessible, and harder to exploit.
What We Build
CLI for responsible AI red teaming. Define YAML test suites to systematically probe LLMs for jailbreaks, prompt injections, biases, harmful content, and policy violations. Works with any OpenAI-compatible API.
Find the vulnerabilities before attackers do. BUSL 1.1 licensed.
View on GitHubAI-first Python web framework. Runs on a $2.50 VPS or Raspberry Pi. 16KB JavaScript footprint works on slow connections. Rejects the "hosting funnel" model that extracts money from developers worldwide.
Built on FastAPI, Pydantic, Starlette. MIT licensed. Launching in Manila and Davao, not SF.
Learn more200 million downloads since 2013. The most popular project scaffolding tool in the Python ecosystem. Now becoming a dependency of Air.
Created by Audrey. Maintained by a global community for years, now undergoing a major modernization effort led by us. Then come the fun, creative parts. MIT licensed.
View on GitHubYou've built an open source community or codebase from scratch, entirely giving away your time and work for free. Not because you had to! Because it felt so good to do it.
You live outside the US and are tired of not getting taken as seriously by the tech community for it.
You've watched "impact" get reduced to spreadsheets and theory (e.g. "Effective Altruism"), while people who actually make real grassroots global change get ignored.
You're sick of Western charity that pities from afar without actually volunteering locally to understand what the real challenges on the ground are.
You've burned out maintaining free software and come back anyway, because the work matters.
You think the best way to help real creators and makers is to build together with them, not for them.
It doesn't matter anymore.
The People
Co-Founder & CTO / Co-Founder & Executive Director. Currently in Manila.
MIT. Answer.AI. Two Scoops of Django. Cookiecutter. Fifteen years building developer tools and doing research for the developers everyone else ignores.
We have a daughter. She's inheriting a world where most developers are locked out. We're not okay with that.
Read our full storyWe need volunteers at all levels to help us grow this, from code contributors to thought leadership. We also need impact investors and philanthropists. Your time and your capital go further here than anywhere in Silicon Valley.