Rauch's $35,000 of personal grants shows what foundational open source now means

Guillermo Rauch announced the second round of his personal open-source grants on September 8th: $1,000 each to 35 contributors, unconditional, and explicitly not from Vercel. Thirty-five thousand dollars of his own money.

Small sums make bad news and good evidence.

Guillermo Rauch@rauchg

▲ ~/𝚛𝚊𝚞𝚌𝚑𝚐/𝚘𝚜𝚜-𝚐𝚛𝚊𝚗𝚝𝚜/ 𝚕𝚜▐ (v2)

I'm announcing v2 of my open source grants of $1,000USD to 35 awesome contributors. The themes:

① Agent skills & tools
Skills are now a valuable form of software, like Emil's world-class design eng work. Projects like 𝚙𝚐𝚋𝚘𝚝, 𝚔𝚗𝚒𝚙, 𝚞𝚗𝚕𝚒𝚐𝚑𝚝𝚑𝚘𝚞𝚜𝚎 create amazing AI engineering loops.

② Local AI
Projects like 𝚜𝚕𝚘𝚝𝚜𝚝𝚛𝚎𝚊𝚖, 𝙻𝚘𝚌𝚊𝚕𝙰𝙸, and 𝚌𝚘𝚕𝚒𝚋𝚛𝚒 are making inference not just a demo but for many a real and growing utility. Exciting to watch local AI unfold.

③ Performance
There's no excuse for software to be slow anymore. Projects like 𝚏𝚏𝚏 and 𝚝𝚊𝚔𝚞𝚖𝚒 leading with speed, compilers like 𝙿𝚎𝚛𝚛𝚢𝚃𝚂 and 𝚙𝚘𝚛𝚏𝚏𝚘𝚛 that can help us upgrade entire ecosystems to native, and 𝚐𝚙𝚞𝚒𝚡 pushing the GPU rendering speed frontier.

④ High quality foundations
AI is still at its best when it can reuse great components than regenerating every time from first principles. Lots of love to folks working on @shadcn, Svelte(kit), Nuxt, Node.js and security foundations.

⑤ Cool experiments
I couldn't resist donating to t.co/j9XATPFzV7, a 'Finance terminal in the terminal', or beautiful funky things like 𝚍𝚒𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚛-𝚔𝚒𝚝.

🔗 t.co/tkCpYPkHxH

PS: These are personal, not affiliated with Vercel, and fully unconditional. If you are listed, I'll be DM'ing you or using your public contact info!

Nobody's rent is being paid here. But somebody who runs one of the platforms most web software is deployed on sat down and wrote a one-line reason next to each of thirty-five projects, and that list is a fairly direct readout of what "foundational" means to that person in September 2026.

So we read all thirty-five reasons and counted them (the page is a plain table; the counting took ten minutes). Fourteen of them name agents, AI, MCP or running models locally — 40% of the list. pgbot is "Postgres tooling for agents". fff is a "Fast and accurate file search SDK for agents". ast-grep is a "CLI for structural code exploration that agents love". slotstream and colibri are engines for running MoE models on a Mac and in pure C respectively. Emil Kowalski's grant is for "Great design eng AI skills & components", and Rauch says why in the post: "Skills are now a valuable form of software."

That is a sentence worth stopping on. A skill is, mechanically, a markdown file with instructions in it.

Eighteen months ago a fund like this would probably have paid for a bundler.

The rest of the list is more familiar and, we would argue, more interesting. Kovid Goyal gets one for kitty and calibre (a terminal and an ebook manager, both a decade-plus of one person's work). Lars Kappert gets one for knip, which finds the code in your repo nobody uses. Oliver Medhurst gets one for porffor, an ahead-of-time JavaScript compiler, and Ralph Küpper for PerryTS, a TypeScript compiler in Rust. Rauch's stated theme there is blunt: "There's no excuse for software to be slow anymore."

And then there is Xe Iaso, whose citation reads "Bot mitigation infrastructure & novel PoW mitigations". Anubis is the proof-of-work gate people put in front of their git forges and wikis to survive AI crawlers.

Read that list again with the first fourteen in mind.

So the same fund pays for the agents and for the sandbags. Which is it, then — is this money backing the crawl or the defence?

Both, and we would not call that hypocrisy. It looks more like an unusually honest picture of the year. If you fund the tools that let software consume the open web at machine speed, then funding the person who keeps small self-hosted git forges standing under that load is the consistent position, not the contradictory one (if you self-host a wiki, you are probably behind something like it already). It is also the only grant on the list that exists because of the other fourteen.

Our read on the money itself is deflationary, and the arithmetic is ours rather than his. Thirty-five thousand dollars is roughly two months of one senior engineer in San Francisco, spread across thirty-five people who between them maintain a terminal emulator, two compilers, a Postgres tool, an MCP fleet and a large part of the Svelte and Nuxt ecosystems. As funding, it is roughly a gesture. As a signal — a public, itemised statement of what a platform CEO believes is load-bearing — it is worth considerably more than $1,000 a name, which is presumably the point of publishing the list at a URL rather than just sending the money.

The obvious objection is that a signal from one person is not a market. Fair, and Rauch is careful to say these are personal and unaffiliated, which likely cuts both ways: no strings, and no continuity either. There is no institution here that has to do this again.

He has now done it twice. Our expectation for a third round: more than half the citations will name agents, AI or MCP. If the share falls instead, something has changed about what the ecosystem thinks it is building, and we would want to know what.