UX

The Internet is still a place, but it’s been overdeveloped and undergoverned. Like cities that have prioritized cars over people, visiting the internet now entails controlled apps and search engines, designed for extraction. There’s nowhere to rest because the benches are covered in spikes. All we can do is sink into the feed and run along the... See more

For each case where we’ve applied branching to a new domain (writing, diagrams, and spreadsheets), we’ve quickly found useful ideas for applying them. This suggests branching is a powerful general primitive for all kinds of creative work.

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

I call some things ‘footguns’. What do I mean with that? A footgun is a gun that is designed to shoot yourself in the foot. I don’t know anything about guns, I have no use for them. But I’ve heard about this phrase and the idea stuck:

A footgun is a piece of code that is designed to do the wrong thing easily.

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