Ahmad Awais

Early life and education

Awais comes from a family of engineers and doctors, and his father is a doctor. People around him expected him to study electrical engineering, whatever his interest in computers. He was an electrical engineering student in Multan. He completed a degree in electrical engineering at a university in Lahore. He also joined a business school for a very short time. [1]

Career

Awais worked as a consultant while Google tried to hire him. He says visas were a heavy burden for someone in his position. He says he has worked as a principal engineer. He received a job offer from AWS and says he had worked with Netflix and Airbnb. [1]

RapidAPI

Awais worked as vice president of engineering and developer relations at RapidAPI. He says RapidAPI grew into a billion-dollar unicorn in about four and a half years. He says he was one of the 10 key executives there. OpenAI asked him to join it. [1]

Open source and recognition

Awais says he has been recognised as a GitHub Star and has been a Google Developer Expert and a Microsoft MVP. He sits on the Google Developers Advisory Board. He served on the technical steering committee of the Node.js Foundation. [1]

He says he is an author of the MCP specification. He says he contributed a lot to WordPress core software, and that he has made many contributions to Firefox, Chrome and the Node.js CLI core. He says he has written more than 300 open source software packages. He also says he got Facebook to open source React. [1]

Awais authored the Shades of Purple code theme, which he says about 7 million developers use. He says he wrote the Corona CLI, a tool that went viral. He had early access to GPT-3, starting in 2020. He says a tool he shared with others was probably one of the earliest coding agents in the space. [1]

Investing and early backing

Awais started angel investing in 2019. He says he has known Stripe since 2011 or 2012. He says a GitHub founder invested in his company's pre-seed round and doubled down. A GitHub founder told him to build a company, and he kept saying no for three years. He has also said he saw no point in taking stock in a non-profit open source company. [1]

Command Code

Awais says Command Code is a Silicon Valley company and that it has raised $5 million from Silicon Valley investors. He says it is one of the top three coding agents right now. He also says it ranks number one on public leaderboards. [1]

According to Awais, Command Code processes over 200 billion tokens a day and repairs at least one million issues per trillion tokens. He says it has its own models and a /design command. He says he invented a model called Taste One that watches a user work and learns from them. [1]

He says a research piece he wrote on fixing DeepSeek tool calling went viral, reaching almost 2 million developers. He says Command Code offered $10 of usage for $1. He says the company is still burning cash and is not aiming to be instantly profitable. [1]

Views on AI and software

Awais says there is no AI bubble, and that this is his belief. He says many people call AI a bubble, meaning a financial bubble rather than a technical one. He says he thinks the field of engineering is gone. He says engineering is potentially a solved problem now and has been completely disrupted by AI. He says software will never go beyond human intelligence. [1]

He says open source is moving away from small, hermit-like communities of nerds. He says software is being democratised at a monumental scale and that the cost of producing anything is deflating. He says open models are 10 to 100 times cheaper. [1]

Awais predicts 500 million people will code, and 400 million of them will not know what they are doing. He says 400 million people will not be able to afford AI at $200 a month. He believes a normal person will use about $1,000 to $2,000 a month of AI. He says the value of AI is not yet known. [1]

He says the hardware layer is a physical bottleneck for AI. He says AI models are black boxes and people do not fully understand how they decide. He says good work will be copied quickly, so builders need a strong sense of taste. He predicts tokens will become a simple subscription. He says you need to be on AI now, whatever your role. [1]

Views on Pakistanis

Awais says Pakistanis have a major branding problem. He also says Pakistanis are very inward-looking. [1]

Working habits and audience

Awais has about 200,000 followers across his social media accounts. He says he has been writing code for almost 27 years and that he loves being an engineer. He says he works about 20 hours a day, with no weekends. [1]

Timeline

2019

Started angel investing.[1]

2020

Had early access to GPT-3.[1]

Appearances

Frequently asked questions

References

1. Ahmad Awais: 400 million coders won't afford AI . Thought Behind Things , 2026-07-27.