August 2026
Launched Livealy, the world's first live website creator. This website runs on it.
Owen Barnes
What do we do now?
Most companies are using AI to automate yesterday. Most people are wondering if there's still a place for them. I work on the real question with both, in the firm belief that you are going to be fine.
For your organisation
Which parts of the business still need to exist, and what to build instead. Start with the Relevance Audit.
For you
What to do when the skills you held dear are repricing. Start with the free audiobook.
The question underneath.
Almost every company is pointing AI at its existing business: agents for enquiries, automated workflows, cheaper operations. It feels like progress, and it misses the point.
Superintelligence on demand, getting cheaper and better every day, does not just change how the current business runs. It changes whether large parts of the current business need to exist at all. The same is true of a career.
When factories first electrified, they unbolted the steam engine and put an electric motor in its place. Same floor, same line shafts. The gains were marginal for decades.
The transformation arrived when they redesigned the whole factory around what electricity actually made possible. Automating what you already do is the line-shaft phase of AI. That redesign is the work.
For your organisation.
One rhythm: see clearly, then build. Every engagement ends in a working thing, never in slideware.
The Relevance Audit
Two days inside your business, fixed scope. An honest map of what survives the era of intelligence on demand, what needs gutting, and what to rebuild from scratch. It ends with a working prototype of the first rebuild, because the map means nothing until something moves.
The Invention Sprint
One day. Your leadership team, one room. Generate the products and services this era makes possible for your company, then ship working prototypes of the best before five o'clock. Not an ideas workshop. An evidence workshop.
Alongside them: workforce transition programmes, the Thinking Partner retainer, technical whitepapers, and keynotes. Every engagement is priced in conversation.
For you.
The ground is moving under everyone's work, including mine. The cure for that feeling isn't information. It's agency: the moment you build something real with AI, fear inverts into capability.
You're Going To Be Fine is my free audiobook for anyone who gets a knot in their stomach thinking about AI. Part reassurance, part wake-up call. Start there, tonight if you need to.
What to tell your children about the future
My signature talk. What's coming, what it means for the people you love, and how to speak about it with honesty and hope.
One-to-one mentoring
Direct access while you retool. You and I build real things together until the future feels like yours again. The price is a conversation.
Why me.
Draw two axes. Technical depth on one, human depth on the other. Then look at where everyone stands.
Heart without the machinery.
The people addressing the human side of AI mostly can't tell you how a transformer works, what a context window is, or what agents can and cannot do.
Machinery without the heart.
The people with the technical depth mostly won't go near meaning, fear, purpose, or what it feels like to watch your profession dissolve.
I do both, and I always have.
Thirty years of building this technology from first principles, and a lifetime of taking the human questions seriously.
Workshops.
I can bring your team up to speed on frontier AI. Not just the tools, but the mindset shift required to use them well. I focus on what AI can do for your business, not generic training.
“I leave every session more terrified about the potential for AI to up-end the world as we currently know it. But at least somewhat reassured that people like Owen are thinking about what that future might look like and how to make sure that it works for everyone rather than a privileged few.”
Dr Christopher Cassar, Candesic · AI Agents workshop · Six Senses London · August 2026
Three things I believe.
1. "Smart" is abundant.
Frontier AI models are now more intelligent than any human. Not just PhD level in one subject, but in all subjects combined.
2. "Heart" is the new moat.
Empathy and taste are now the most valuable skills in technology.
3. A new generation is rewriting the rules.
Young people have no appetite for endless wars, divisive media, broken institutions, or technology that makes us feel disconnected.
Technology is neither good nor bad. It mirrors the consciousness of whoever builds it.
Who I am.
I've been falling in love with technology since I was a kid in the 90s, inserting AOL CDs, connecting to IRC on a modem that blocked the phone line to the house.
Today I live at the frontier of AI. I used Claude Code the week it launched, and jumped on OpenClaw early (see ClawClub).
After winning several hackathons around the idea of an in-browser rendering engine, I kept experimenting with this idea and it became Livealy.com - the world's first live website creator. I'm now working on this full time, with consulting and workshops alongside.
Underneath it all there has been one idea for thirty years: reality responds to the observer. SocketStream made the page respond in real time. The whitepapers I contributed to described worlds so vividly that capital assembled to build them. Livealy composes the page around whoever arrives. Working with me hands that same power to you. You are not a passenger of the future, you are one of its authors.
Contributed
Status.im whitepaper · Polkadot litepaper
Speaking
London Business School · Imperial College · Urbit
Events
Devcon x5 · EthCC x3 · EthBerlin x2 · 10+ Hackathons
Advisory
McKinsey · Capco · board level
Latest updates.
June 2026
Won 2nd Prize on the Generative UI track at the Google CopilotKit Hackathon in London.
May 2026
Started building the future of websites and generative UI. It became Livealy.
April 2026
Our team won first prize and the Google DeepMind prize at Tech Europe AI Hackathon with HiveCoding. Watch the demo.
March 2026
Built ClawClub.social. Fully open source. Join the OG group today or start your own!
February 2026
Launched my free audiobook about AI: You're Going To Be Fine.
Talks.
The Future of Personal AI
Urbit Assembly · Lisbon · 2023
The Future of Apps
Urbit Volcano Summit · El Salvador · 2023
Twelve Thoughts on the Future of Web3
EthBrno · 2022
Censorship in an Immutable World
Talk
Bitcoin and Ethereum
Technical talk · London
Problems with Modern Software Development
Talk · 2018
What I'm building.
You're looking at it. Livealy re-imagines what a website is in the AI era, and it is the first of its kind in the world. Click around. On desktop, press the D and R keys.
It generates live, personalized pages on demand, in your brand's own colors, fonts and images. Each one can carry video, audio, Google Maps, contact forms and interactive FAQs, composed and rendered in under two seconds for around half a cent.
Real-time HTML would be far too slow and expensive, so it runs on two invented protocols: one tuned for the model's output tokens, one sent to the browser and rendered into a fully animated, scroll-aware page with collision detection and readability guarantees. The magic is the bridge between them, which decides the layout and composition of every page.
ClawClub - private, curated communities with zero engagement metrics. No ads, likes, or feed to scroll. Your AI agent only tells you about events, job opportunities, and posts it thinks you'll find interesting.
Writing.
On dynamic rendering, natural language specifications, and the end of the app paradigm.
What Comes After Vibe Coding
March 2025
Vibe coders need a dedicated hosting platform. One that pays them!
The traditional hosting model is backwards for vibe coders. They need vibe hosting.
February 2025