Ben Holmes

Ben Holmes is a software developer at Warp and a technical educator known for short whiteboard explanations of topics including React Server Components, HTMX, and SQLite. His AI work includes note-enrichment and wiki-maintenance skills, the Hubble.md notes app, and a shared effort to migrate Warp’s documentation into a system accessible to both developers and agents.[2][6][7][8]

Holmes announced Hubble Note in September 2025 as an experimental side project: a Markdown-backed writing app with an assistant to find, organize, and expand notes. He described returning to Apple Notes after years of trying Zettelkasten workflows and refining Notion and Obsidian templates. His goal was to preserve the ease of a scratchpad while reducing the work required to organize it. By July 2026, he was inviting readers to use Hubble.md as a free, open-source notes app.[5][6]

In his July 2026 knowledge-base guide, Holmes explained the /enrich-note skill he wrote. It maintains a shared tags.md registry, researches source URLs for notes drawn from books or other media, and searches the vault for related notes to link. He instructs agents to reuse existing tags because, in his experience, they invent new ones too freely. An enrichedAt timestamp lets scheduled runs skip previously processed notes: idempotency is part of the workflow’s design.[6]

Holmes built the next layer on Andrej Karpathy’s LLM-wiki concept, crediting Karpathy for the idea of a persistent, interlinked knowledge base. Holmes’s own /refresh-wiki skill ingests new or changed raw notes, updates entity and concept pages, and checks for contradictions, orphan pages, and stale claims. He favors maintaining this accumulating artifact over having a model rediscover the same knowledge for each question.[6]

A practical failure shaped his automation advice. Holmes recalled that his local jobs stopped while he was away for several days because he had left his laptop unplugged. He recommended cloud runners and wrote /enrich-notes-loop-cloud and /refresh-wiki-cloud: wrappers that pull an Obsidian vault into a Warp Oz sandbox, run the underlying skill, and sync the results back. He also encoded environment and schedule setup in /setup-oz-automations.[6]

Hubble.md also extends the notes interface beyond text. It displays HTML apps alongside notes and supplies runtime APIs for reading files in the current directory, allowing visualizations to update from the underlying Markdown. Holmes’s examples include a note-taking activity graph and a graph of notes clustered by their most-used tags.[6]

At Warp’s March 2026 hackathon, Holmes worked with Hong Yi Chen and Petra Donka to move documentation from GitBook to Astro Starlight. The choice supported the docs team’s preferred workflow: Markdown edited through GitHub pull requests. The team added a Kapa-backed Ask AI widget, exposed documentation as plain Markdown for agents, and set up Vercel hosting with preview deployments. In his March 16 account, Holmes reported that the team migrated 266 pages in a four-hour span, with production validation still to come.[7]

Hong Yi Chen’s May 4 launch account confirmed that the documentation had moved to the new stack and been open-sourced. After the afternoon prototype, production work covered redirects, SEO metadata, broken links, theming, dark mode, and the API reference. Chen credited Holmes, Petra Donka, Rachael Renk, and Danny Neira for contributions across the completed effort. The resulting system provides Markdown copies of pages for Warp’s retrieval pipeline and uses versioned agent skills for review and maintenance.[8]

Holmes’s FixGPT repository documents an interface for simultaneous text and voice conversation, with model selection depending on the request. Its Go server generates connection keys for OpenAI’s realtime API and provides endpoints for handing complex queries to a reasoning model. A Flutter client contains the mobile interface. The project illustrates a concrete separation between conversational interaction and more demanding reasoning requests.[4]

Before these AI projects, Holmes worked on web frameworks and content tooling. His earlier Markdown-based work supplies context for Hubble’s file-based design and his documentation contributions at Warp.[5][7]

In his September 2025 retrospective, Holmes dated the start of his technical blog to 2018 and his self-hosted blog to 2019. Rebuilding that site in 2021 led to Slinkity, his own framework based on Vite and Markdown. He said he was hired to work on Astro in 2022, helping make Markdown content easier to build, organize, and extend, and began working with LLMs in 2024. He described himself as an Astro core maintainer in July 2025; his personal profiles explicitly clarify that he did not invent Astro.[5][9][2][1]

In his July 2025 response to DHH’s gift-exchange analogy, Holmes argued that maintainers should “reward vulnerability with gratitude.” He credited Astro’s documentation leaders with clear contribution guidelines and an accessible process, highlighting Sarah Rainsberger’s explanation of their community approach. He described thoughtful reviews, contributor recognition, and thanks as ways to sustain participation.[9]

Holmes also defended maintainer boundaries: a project needs direction, and not every contribution belongs in its core. His expectation was that rejection should come with clear communication and an accessible place for discussion. He favored designing for a broad community, including people whose preferences differ from those of the maintainers, while acknowledging that this approach requires more work.[9]