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In light of all the stuff about Thiel and friends, I'd really stay away from Tolkien/Middle-Earth themed startup names for now...
Any naming related to LotR in the tech industry is a glaring red flag, including this company.
> Despite its Tolkien-inspired name, Earendil is not a tech company with fascist tendencies. Quite the opposite. They are basically well-meaning hippies in my book
But who am I to judge? If I made a project as popular as pi I'd sell out so fast.
This was a solid letter to the fans. I get why it’s disappointing to some, but it sounds like it was the right move for them personally. For people who’ve earned that kind of credibility, I say congrats on the move.
Understandable, I'd probably do the same in his position. Still sucks, we've seen this pattern a thousands times before and what happens next is pretty obvious. I was prototyping something with pi under the hood for a personal project, going to switch off it now.
I guess Earendil sounds a lot like Anduril - had to check and now I understand they are not defense contractors!
Got similar vibes from that name but because it sounds like a LOTR thing and that (sadly) makes me think Palantir.
Tolkien stole the name from an Anglo Saxon poem, with a somewhat unclear meaning. His version of the story is woven through lots of his work, from the very earliest days. You could view all of Middle-earth as elaborating on his attempt to assign a meaning to it.
I read most of the post, went to the linked project and still don't have an idea what this is about.
Pi is a coding agent harness, like Claude Code, but significantly better and more elegant. Here is a good post describing it: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/1/31/pi/ I switched a few months ago and have not looked back. Unfortunately Anthropic blocked access from Claude Subscription users today, but that's a different story.
So what makes Pi better than CC? Is it better than OpenCode?
Understandable, I'd probably do the same in his position. Still sucks, we've seen this pattern a thousands times before and what happens next is pretty obvious. I was prototyping something with pi under the hood for a personal project, going to switch off it now.
This is so disappointing. Finally we had a fantastic, fully OSS, non-profit harness. Very extensible, well-made, minimal, untainted. None of the baggage of OpenCode both in terms of codebase as well as its.. "passionate" leadership, to put it mildly. > Earendil is a public benefit corporation Ah, so like OpenAI then. > But I've also learned what I do not want. I do not want to build my own company around pi. We have…
Because he wants to have tons of money in the bank and get up every day to go do anything he wants with his four-year-old kid when he wakes up. Building something in a couple months that got popular enough to be able to this is amazing. Not check GitHub issues and PRs from ClawdBot5000 and hope he'll make some money from it in 5 years.
We're entering a new world of software development that allows people with no coding experience to do things like build their own mobile apps, websites, and all sorts of other things that were previously reserved for only technical people. The gap is closing quickly. At this point, if you're a "real" developer and have an app that somebody wants to purchase, you'd be crazy not to take the offer if it's a good amount and have cash in the bank that would allow you to do your own stuff in the future without worrying about $dayjob.
In light of all the stuff about Thiel and friends, I'd really stay away from Tolkien/Middle-Earth themed startup names for now...
Mario having to write this many words to justify this decision alone is a red flag already. The fact I can't understand what Earendil is after reading this many words is an even bigger red flag. But who am I to judge? If I made a project as popular as pi I'd sell out so fast.
If Mario had instead just written: "I'm excited to work on the future of PI at Palantir." and nothing else, clearly this is worse?
> The fact I can't understand what Earendil is
From the article:
> I learned a few things. My European brain thinks pi is just another small, mildly useful OSS project of mine with no commercial value. My peers in the space seem to think it has properties that make it stand out over the alternatives. VCs and big corps seem to think that pi has commercial value. Some demonstrated their conviction by sending term sheets or "dream job" offers.
Mario thinks there's no commercial value, but clearly some VC people do. If you have the VC money, but don't have any ideas for how to justify commercial viability, why bother? If someone just handed me a big bag of cash and told you to just "do something", I could imagine coming up with Earndil. Make a nice landing page, write some nice guiding principles, and figure out the AI stuff later.