Omarchy, or: Notes From a Third-Level Wizard
I just watched David Heinemeier Hansson talk to Lex Fridman for five hours. Five. Hours. And the whole time I kept thinking: this guy is just like me.
Then I did the math.
Where I'm a third-level wizard, DHH is an eleventh-level wizard. Where he can hold sixteen threads in his head and run sixteen agents at once, I top out at three before I start dropping things. Where he has an unlimited bucket of tokens to throw at a problem, I'm watching the meter — every bit of agentic magic I cast costs me actual dollars, and I feel each one.
Same spellbook. Very different mana pool.
But here's the thing about Omarchy — the Arch-and-Hyprland rig DHH built, and then spent a good chunk of those five hours enthusing about — it closes the gap more than it has any right to.
The keyboard made me honest
First, it forced me onto the keyboard. Properly. No more hunting for a trackpad,
no more digging through menus. Super + a letter and the window goes where I
want it. It felt hostile for about a day and then it felt like my hands had been
lying to me for twenty years.
The actual magic
But the keyboard isn't the headline. The headline is that there is now a direct line from me to an AI agent to my operating system and my hardware.
An AI-first OS. Game changer, and I don't throw that phrase around. I don't think I understood what it meant until I lived in it for a week.
Small example. I dock my laptop to a USB-C hub, lid down, and I wanted it to
stay awake and then wake when I wiggle the mouse. I could have figured that out
— logind config, hypridle, some incantation about lid switches — an hour of
open tabs, probably. Instead I typed one sentence to the AI and it was so. Done.
Correct. Explained back to me.
That is not a party trick. That is the friction of owning a computer just... dissolving.
The app thing is genuinely bonkers
And then there is what you build on top of it. Off the top of my head, lately:
- A Lode Runner plugin, because why should a game not live in my window manager
- A replacement for Typora — my own Markdown editor, and honestly it suits how I work better than the thing it replaced. I'm writing this in it.
- A speedometer app for my phone
None of these took a weekend. They took an evening, or an afternoon, or a prompt and a coffee.
So what is this going to be like in a year?
That's the question I can't put down.
Right now I'm a third-level wizard casting spells that would have been a whole dev team five years ago, on an OS that treats "just ask it" as a first-class input method. The tools get better every month. My token budget is the main thing holding me back, and even that curve points the right way.
Give it a year. The eleventh-level wizards will be doing things I can't picture yet. But the gap to them was never the point. The point is where I'll be — still third level, sure, but a third-level wizard with Omarchy and another year's practice is going to be dangerous.
I'm agog. That's the only honest word for it.