May 6, 2026
Commitment issues? Not anymore
Going Full Time on Open Source
Beloved app-maker quits day job as fans cheer, worry, and crack AI apocalypse jokes
TLDR: Jeff quit his job to work full time on mise, a widely used free software tool, because it had grown too big to manage on nights and weekends. The comments were mostly supportive, but they also turned into a debate over whether human-run open-source projects can still survive in an AI-hype world.
The big plot twist here isn’t just that Jeff is leaving a steady job at Figma to work full time on mise and his other free tools — it’s that the comment section instantly turned into a mix of support group, business advice column, and meme factory. Mise, a popular app that helps developers manage the tools they need, has gotten so big that Jeff says he was drowning in messages and deleting notifications just to stay sane. Now he’s betting on memberships, company sponsorships, consulting, and maybe future paid services to keep the whole thing alive.
And the crowd? Surprisingly invested. One fan popped in with a simple love letter: they already sponsor the project and hope it works out. Another commenter said this is actually reassuring news, because their company had worried about relying on something mostly run by one person. In other words: people are not just rooting for Jeff, they’re quietly admitting they need this thing to survive.
But of course, no internet announcement is complete without at least one wildly dramatic hot take. Enter the doomer joke of the thread: a commenter snarked that, according to "Bun guy," open-source software will be written only by AI by 2027, with humans basically banned. That got the community’s core tension onto the table: can a human-made free project still become a real career? Others pushed back with a more thoughtful angle, arguing the real value is not just typing code, but the maintainer’s judgment — knowing what to build next, and what to reject. Translation: the comments say Jeff isn’t just selling software, he’s selling taste, trust, and survival.
Key Points
- •The author says he left Figma to work full time on open source developer tools, primarily mise, under a new company called en.dev.
- •According to the article, mise has more than 27,000 GitHub stars and is the 10th most downloaded Homebrew formula.
- •The author says maintaining mise and related tools alongside a full-time job had become unsustainable, especially for pull request review and notification volume.
- •Current revenue is described as about $100 per month from documentation ads and $500 per month from GitHub Sponsors, which the author says is insufficient to live on.
- •To make the work sustainable, the article outlines revenue plans including individual memberships, company sponsorships, consulting for teams adopting mise, and possible future paid services.