Malleable software does not imply everybody creating all of their own tools from scratch. That would be a waste of time, since many off-the-shelf tools are already pretty close to serving our needs, with only minor tweaks needed.

A more sensible approach is to start out using existing software tools built by other people or companies, but to have... See more

Bringing AI coding tools into today’s software ecosystem is like bringing a talented sous chef to a food court. If you’re used to purchasing meals from a menu, a skilled chef can’t do much to help you. Similarly, if you’re using closed-source software from an app store, an AI coding assistant can’t do very much to help you as a user. To fully take... See more

Level 1 was read-only; Levels 2 and 3 supported text and graphical editing with direct manipulation interactions; Level 4 added creating buttons and linking things together; Level 5 unlocked full programming using a scripting language called HyperTalk

How can users tweak the existing tools they’ve installed, rather than just making new siloed applications? How can AI-generated tools compose with one another to build up larger workflows over shared data? And how can we let users take more direct, precise control over tweaking their software, without needing to resort to AI coding for even the... See more

The original promise of personal computing was a new kind of clay—a malleable material that users could reshape at will. Instead, we got appliances: built far away, sealed, unchangeable. When your tools don’t work the way you need them to, you submit feedback and hope for the best. You’re forced to adapt your workflow to fit your software, when it... See more

the tools and infrastructure we use to deploy software treat users as passive recipients rather than active co-creators. Software is organized into monolithic applications rather than flexible remixable toolkits.