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Bio, Work & Ideas

Ben Holmes

Conference affiliation: Dev Rel Lead · Warp · 2026

Ben Holmes is Warp’s developer-experience lead, an Astro core maintainer, and the creator of Hubble, an open-source Markdown notebook for people and coding agents. Known for his whiteboard explanations, he builds developer tools that make complex infrastructure easier to understand and put to work.

At Astro, Holmes coauthored a 2022 release introducing integrations and the astro add command. In 2023, he introduced Astro Content Collections, bringing schemas, generated TypeScript types, query helpers, and actionable validation errors to Markdown and MDX. He subsequently coauthored the 2024 release that stabilized Astro Actions, simplifying type-safe backend functions and form handling.

His independent projects turn intimidating web technologies into approachable implementations: simple-rsc reconstructs React Server Components, simple-sync-engine explores SQLite-backed synchronization, and simple-stack pares down web-application architecture.

  • Multimodal interfaces with persistent context: Holmes’s FixGPT prototype combines realtime voice with written responses, allowing assistants to surface links, drafts, and detailed explanations without interrupting a conversation. Its heuristic model routing hands more demanding questions to reasoning models through tool calls, sparing users from manually selecting among obscure model names.
  • Agent-accessible Markdown notes: Hubble starts with quick capture, including voice dictation, and keeps knowledge in ordinary files that people and agents can both inspect. An enrichment skill adds source links, controlled tags, backlinks, and timestamps; the fixed tag vocabulary prevents needless categories, while timestamps keep agents from repeatedly processing completed notes.
  • Scheduled knowledge-base enrichment: Holmes extends those notes into interconnected topic wikis, people indexes, and navigable HTML visualizations, crediting Andrej Karpathy for an existing wiki-generation idea. His knowledge-base walkthrough demonstrates synchronizing Markdown through the Obsidian CLI into Docker-backed cloud sandboxes, running scheduled agent tasks, and returning updated files to their owner.

Read the topics behind these talks

2 conference talks

Key ideas

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Ben Holmes’s FixGPT prototype keeps written answers inside a live voice conversation and uses tool calls to hand deeper questions to a reasoning model.

  • An email draft trapped in a voice conversation
    0:00 ↗
  • When the organization becomes the interface
    1:13 ↗
  • Keep the call open and put the draft beside it
    2:07 ↗
  • Let the request determine the amount of reasoning
    3:19 ↗
  • From a park link to a deeper history
    3:56 ↗
  • Two tools connect the experience
    4:37 ↗

Key ideas

Scroll to read ↓

Start with a folder of rough Markdown notes, then use agent skills to add links, build focused wikis, schedule maintenance and generate views of what you know.

  • Start with the notes you already lose
    0:17 ↗
  • Capture enough raw material
    2:43 ↗
  • Turn enrichment into a repeatable skill
    5:41 ↗
  • Run it on a note, then browse the connections
    7:48 ↗
  • Build a wiki around an area of interest
    10:09 ↗
  • Keep people connected to their source context
    12:32 ↗
  • Move maintenance into the background
    13:31 ↗
  • Return to the live result
    17:24 ↗
  • Build views beyond Markdown
    17:52 ↗

References