Developing Computational Agency

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

I think it’s likely that soon all computer users will have the ability to develop small software tools from scratch, and to describe modifications they’d like made to software they’re already using. In other words, LLMs will represent a step change in tool support for end-user programming: the ability of normal people to fully harness the general p... See more

The really malleable software revolution requires not individual changes, individual apps adding plugins or scripting. The real malleable software shift is when the whole experience is built to be malleable. The general systems research for operating systems to host not just applications, but to host views and tools and data flow, history event sou... See more