HASSANHABIB

§ 00 — HASSAN HABIB

I build software,
teams, and communities
that outlive me.

Author of The Standard — a unified engineering standard for building distributed systems — and founder of a global open-source community dedicated to free education, free healthcare, and better software for everyone.

hassan@peerllm:~

$ whoami

Engineer. Author. Open-source advocate.

$ hassan --mission

Decentralize intelligence. Elevate people, not erase them.

$ hassan --now

Building PeerLLM · The Standard for Agents · Standup with Hassan

$ hassan --stats --live

2,055,580 NuGet downloads · ☆ 1,243 Standard stars

type help to explore this site from the shell

Portrait of Hassan Habib
// hassan.habib

§ 01 — WRITING

Latest posts

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The title is intentionally provocative.When I say Robots & Monkeys, I am not talking about robots taking over the world in some predictable science-fiction fashion. I am talking about something much quieter and, in many…

Agentic coding assistants are becoming the double agents of software engineering.On one side, they are loyal allies. They help you move faster, ship sooner, explore ideas quicker, and get unstuck in places where you…

aiartificial-intelligence

AI is a sharp knife. It can be used for harm, or it can be used for benefit. That is the nature of all tools. They may imply a purpose, but they are not purposeful on their own.The question has never been whether AI is…

aiartificial-intelligencelayoffs

§ 02 — WATCHING

Latest on YouTube

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§ 03 — POSTING

Latest on LinkedIn

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Just released: PeerLLM v2.11.0 — Qwen 3.8 is now officially approved on the decentralized network. 27B, 262K context, Apache 2.0. ~55 tok/sec on a consumer RTX 5090. Not a datacenter — hardware people already own.

100 reactions 17 comments

What owns you? Your job? Your title? Your possessions? If your job, title, or possessions vanished tomorrow — what remains?

19 reactions 2 comments

Do what is yours to do, remain patient, and don’t torment yourself over what passed you by. What is yours cannot be stolen by circumstance, and what is not yours cannot be secured by force.

75 reactions

§ 04 — BUILDING

Projects & products

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SEPOCTNOVDECJANFEBMARAPRMAYJUNJULAUG

4,356 contributions in the last year · github.com/hassanhabib

PeerLLM

A decentralized AI network — people-powered LLM hosting where anyone can run open-source models on their own hardware, serve real inference to the world, and earn from it. Private, distributed, and built for a decentralized future.

AIDecentralizationProduct

The Standard

A unified standard for engineering distributed systems — covering brokers, services, exposers, and everything in between. Free and open to everyone, translated by the community into multiple languages.

EngineeringBookOpen Source

The Standard for AI Agents

The Standard, applied to agents: Agent = Orchestration(Data, Decision, Direction). A simple, reliable, and accountable way to engineer AI agents — with a C# reference implementation on NuGet.

AIAgentsOpen Source

§ 05 — AT SCALE

Products I helped build

Before the one-person-army era: products built with big teams at Microsoft and Amazon, used by hundreds of millions of people.

Xbox Subscriptions

Xbox Subscriptions

Commerce engineering on Microsoft's Universal Store — the subscription and billing rails behind Xbox, serving millions of players around the world.

@ Microsoft MORE →

Office Subscriptions

Subscription platform work for Office and Microsoft 365 — recurring commerce for one of the most-used software products on earth.

@ Microsoft MORE →
HoloLens 2.0

HoloLens 2.0

Engineering on the HoloLens 2 platform — mixed reality at the bleeding edge, where hardware, vision, and software meet.

@ Microsoft MORE →

AWS Infrastructure

Infrastructure engineering at Amazon Web Services — the compute backbone a large slice of the internet runs on.

@ Amazon MORE →
Xbox Subscriptions

Xbox Subscriptions

@ Microsoft

Microsoft's Universal Store is the commerce platform behind purchases across Xbox, Windows, and Microsoft 365 — carts, entitlements, renewals, and billing for one of the largest storefronts on earth.

My work lived in the subscription rails: the systems that sign players up, keep Game Pass and Live renewals flowing, and make sure billing never gets in the way of someone sitting down to play.

Working at that scale — where a small bug becomes millions of support tickets — is where the discipline that later became The Standard was forged.

Office Subscriptions

@ Microsoft

Office turned into Microsoft 365 by becoming a subscription — and that flip made recurring commerce as critical as the apps themselves.

I worked on the subscription platform side: purchase, renewal, and billing flows that had to be boringly reliable for hundreds of millions of users, from students to entire enterprises.

HoloLens 2.0

HoloLens 2.0

@ Microsoft

HoloLens 2 was Microsoft betting that computing could leave the screen — untethered mixed reality where holograms live in your room and your hands are the input device.

Being part of that platform meant engineering where hardware, computer vision, and software meet — with constraints nothing in normal app development prepares you for.

The photo is my own device, badge and all. I later wrote about where I think this is all heading.

Read: Brief History of the Future of Mixed Reality

AWS Infrastructure

@ Amazon

Before Microsoft, Amazon — working on AWS infrastructure, the layer of compute a huge slice of the internet quietly runs on.

When your platform is everyone else's foundation, reliability is not a feature, it is the product. That mindset never left me.

Xbox photo: Evan Amos (public domain), via Wikimedia Commons. HoloLens 2: Hassan's own — badge and all.

§ 06 — HONORS

Awards

Silver Play Button

Silver Play Button

Presented for passing 100,000 subscribers — the channel has since flown past half a million.

YouTube

Impact Award

For providing exceptional dedication and inspiration to learners by expanding their career exposure and bringing real-world relevance to education — as a virtual volunteer helping prepare students for the future of work.

Nepris
5-Year Service Award

5-Year Service Award

Five years of building commerce, subscriptions, and mixed reality — crystal, book, and BOSS mug included.

Microsoft

§ 07 — WORDS

Quotes

“There is a profound difference between using intelligence to extend your thinking and using intelligence instead of thinking.”

X · Aug 2026

“AI can write code. AI can explain code. AI can debug code. So why are experienced developers still in such high demand? Because companies do not pay for code. They pay for judgment. They pay for trade-offs. They pay for architecture. And most importantly, they pay for someone who knows when AI is wrong.”

X · Aug 2026

“The real risk isn’t that machines gain intelligence, it’s that humans lose purpose.”

X · Apr 2026

“Centralized AI concentrates power, cost, and control. Decentralized AI distributes capability, ownership, and progress.”

X · Jan 2026

“Technology should elevate people, not erase them.”

X · Feb 2026

“Talent is global; opportunity isn’t.”

X · Jan 2026

“Typing code was never the job. Thinking was. Programming isn’t dead. It just keeps changing keyboards. It always has. It always will.”

X · Jan 2026

“Bad software makes good people look bad.”

X · Jun 2026

“Lack of knowledge may be forgiven in the presence of virtue, but no abundance of knowledge can excuse the absence of character.”

X · May 2026

“Software engineering isn’t about avoiding rabbit holes. It’s more about knowing which rabbit hole is worth going into.”

X · Oct 2025

“Discipline eats motivation for breakfast.”

X · Feb 2025

§ 08 — AUTHOR

Books

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Cover of The Standard

The Standard

The ultimate guide to building enterprise-level systems from idea to product. The Standard describes how to model, name, test, and structure software so any engineer can walk into any Standard-compliant codebase and feel at home. Free to read on GitHub, forever — also available on Amazon.

FREE TO READ · FOREVER