For the last ~year I've been keeping a close eye on how language models capabilities meaningfully change the speed, ease, and accessibility of software development. The slightly bold theory I put forward in this talk is that we're on a verge of a golden age of local, home-cooked software and a new kind of developer – what I've called the barefoot developer.

In America, our culture has become anticipation.

At some point, there was a switch, in which we became an edging culture. One rooted in “pre-”.

With AI, I suspect we’ll be able to play with the compression of anticipation with software objects well. Teasing an idea on Twitter, seeing it’s response, putting that prompt in AI to generate just enough code for the resemblance of the thing → and that reaching consumer hands much faster.

Perhaps anticipation culture is the wedded partner of instant-gratification culture. It’s the only thing that allows us to microdose the gratification of the object before we actually have it. Constantly watching trailers, or runway shows, sneak peaks, etc

I find this all lines up incredibly well to VC culture. The discussion is 90% weighted on the raise

The anticipation is lost as its material reality fails to hold any long term attention. Even if it was the exact promise. We simply love the build up. The image of the thing.

The “pre-”, other than consuming behind the scenes content of an artist’s process, is all mental. As I participate as a dancer in the audience, I can only (if I care to) construct fiction of the worked anticipation of the overall performance. But 90%+ of the audience only cares about the anticipation of the next drop or track. The loop is built in.

To bring it all the way back to the tweet that launched this post. Anticipation is exhausting. It is built around uncertainty, and the quelling of said uncertainty by the fragments of the objects chosen to be presented.

Stack Overflow’s commitment to purity has served it well. But if other platforms with a different — non-diabolical — culture offer what Stack Overflow does, then why stick to a place that is no longer the rare commodity it used to be?

Stack Overflow has enduring popularity, at least in software. Why is it that a resource like it — a centralized, global resource to ask questions — is not as common in other industries?

Rituals are how we make meaning, personally and together.

In games studies, these worlds-within-a-world are called magic circles. A magic circle is the space where the game takes place.

We need ritual technology. Technology designed for ritual use.

Why? Most of the software we use daily is designed to engagement-max. Social media feeds, loot boxes, compulsion loops, gang gang yes yes yes ice cream so good. You’re caught in a feedback loop with the algorithm, and you are the squishiest part of that loop.

Where social media is compulsive, tools for thought are reflective. Where social media is here and now, tools for thought dwell in the long now. Tools for thought slowly build compounding momentum through low, slow feedback loops that point us in the directions we want to develop.