I remember back in High School my father told me about a man creating the machines necessary to rebuild a society from the ground up. Naturally being a high school student I shunned the thought. Years later in early 2026 I found myself being interviewed by that man and his organization.

That man is [Marcin Jakubowski] and his organization is [Open Source Ecology]. He’s a PhD inventor who’s spent the last fifteen years designing and open-sourcing a full suite of farm and construction machines under the [Global Village Construction Set]. Right now he’s building toward an academy: a program to replicate himself, to train people to think and build the way he does. He needs more people. I decided to apply.

After finishing the first few parts of the process (written stuff & creating a wall module in OSE’s design in my own garage to prove my skills) Marcin invited me out for an in person interview.

My first day on site I made parts of roof modules with another person on the team. By the end of the week those parts were put together as full modules and placed on top of the hangar. That night I talked to Marcin for 2 hours over dinner about everything. I offered to stay another few days to help finish up the hangar.

To make things make sense: the hangar is a massive indoor facility on the OSE campus designed specifically for fully optimized house construction. Three small houses can be built inside of it at once. The houses are OSE-design costing about $60,000 in materials. Marcin just sold the first one for $212,000 but the blueprints for these houses are entirely open source so that anyone can build one.

A few weeks later I was at my father’s place in Florida. I spent the two weeks I was there building [Iconic CAD].

Iconic CAD is a tool that I’ve been building for OSE. It lets someone without CAD experience design a professional-grade file for one of these houses in 10 minutes. Without it, designing your own version requires a true CAD professional and MANY hours. With it, anybody can place modules in a snap-grid while the compiler does the hard work of turning it into a real CAD file.

The work has continued since. There’s more to say about Iconic CAD than fits here. I’ll be writing about it on its own from now on.