Got a little too into making poppies for this reflection on great WWI novels and digesting the horrors of the war. maggieappleton.com/in-memoriam

Obsessed with “Yesteryear”. So well written, funny, a necessary critique of the tradwives. I had to ask Claude for the gist of the twist at the end before reading, because it’s labelled a “thriller” and I am too soft to read anything truly horrifying. But it’s not that kind of thriller. Sort of…

How is everyone managing their agent SKILL.md files? Is it just chaos? Global skills, repo-specific skills, keeping them in sync between machines, figuring out which ones you have installed, authoring new ones. What are we doing?

Extremely jelly of everyone who have a set of clear, measurable, computable metrics that define their tasks as “done” No 12 hour autonomous agent runs for designers who live in the tight feedback loop 😭

Got to talk at @aidotengineer.bsky.social conf last week about the need for collaborative AI engineering. All our current coding agents are single player. We're trying to scale up individual productivity, but creating tons of alignment problems in the process. We have no good tools for...

Putting together the final touches on slides for my talk at AI Engineer conf this Thursday @aidotengineer.bsky.social Talking about how we need realtime, multiplayer, collaborative agentic dev tools. Not isolated, single player terminal instances. And showing one we've built at @githubnext.com!

After an unexpected flood of messages from my kid’s nursery about the “Easter bonnet competition” deadline, I have now learned this is a thing. Very camp. Very British. It’s giving Victorian children with more access to crafting supplies than expected.

Obsidian & Claude Cowork are doing all the house management and renovation tracking that I don't have brain space for right now. I ramble at Claude about things we need to fix in this very old and rundown Victorian we recent bought and it makes plans. Works great - both just operate on markdown.

God grant me the wisdom to understand the internal logic of the credit system

We have reached a moment where instead of releasing software you simply release the detailed spec for software and tell people to prompt their agent to build it themselves From the README of OpenAI’s new Symphony orchestrator: github.com/openai/symph...

What’s everyone’s physical labour backup career? I’m thinking family photographer. Maybe interior designer? I’m not good at either of those things… yet. But I reckon I could make it work if all white collar jobs melt down into the GPUs.

First full, uninterrupted night of sleep in 10.5 months. The baby finally got with the programme. It’s a brave new world.

The whole GitHub Next team is coming to London in March! And we're hosting a meet-up for anyone interested in the next generation of software eng tools Sign-up here → luma.com/v5eltkec?tk=... March 3rd at 6pm We'll show our recent work & research, but also have open spots for community demos

Speculative Software Engineering with GitHub Next · Luma

The pace of change in software engineering is absurd right now. If that makes you more excited than terrified, this is an evening for you. Come join the GitHub…

luma.com

As a person with a liberal arts education, I’m egotistically biased to strong agree with this. But legit my whole day is just doing tons of critical thinking, meta thinking, and design thinking - the kind I learned in my crunchy lib arts school - in order to decide what to prompt the bots to make

A delightful feature of near-perfect-voice-to-text is that when my husband and I are pottering about at home, talking to our devices about work problems or baby things or side projects, we get lots of context on the things occupying each other’s minds…

TFW you talk to Claude to sharpen your idea and it’s like “yes, of course you have this idea. Bret Victor put this idea in your head a decade ago” I am a stochastic Bret Victor parrot.

The meta-machine continues to grow of its own accord

Maggie Appleton@maggieappleton.com · 6mo ago

Designing designs < designing custom machines for designs

Designing designs < designing custom machines for designs

Someone pointed out dark mode didn't work on my website (a huge oversight!). Claude implemented dark mode in <10 mins. But the diagrams in my latest post still looked weird since I designed them on light backgrounds. But they're SVGs so it was easy to prompt a bit more and get dark/light versions

I have Gas Town derangement syndrome and spent the last few weeks writing thousands of words on agent orchestration patterns; how they shift our bottlenecks and force us to ask whether and when we should stop looking at code maggieappleton.com/gastown

Gas Town’s Agent Patterns, Design Bottlenecks, and Vibecoding at Scale

On agent orchestration patterns, why design and critical thinking are the new bottlenecks, and whether we should let go of looking at code

maggieappleton.com

The London Future of coding meetup came back last night! Now renamed to "the feeling of computing". More context on the name change: feelingof.com/the-name/ I handed over running it to @todepond.com, @mimireyburn.bsky.social, and Chee. They're doing great – same energy and wild demos as always

Extremely funny. The author is a New Zealander so has a finely tuned taste for wry sarcasm Also features this banger John Updike quote: “celebrity is a mask that eats your face.” Unsurprisingly about Sheryl Sandberg. Strong recommend. Not the exaggerated tell-all I expected. Much better.

I am going to need three more brains to process the current rate of change in any reasonable fashion.

I hadn't tried out Nano Banana for diagrams yet so I had a little play. Wonderfully promising and hilariously crap in the details. So close and yet so far.

Figuring out a workflow to make Claude better at creating diagrams and illustrated explanations. By default it is pretty crap - see this example. Labels overlap. Arrows in the wrong place. Text too small. But it's also decent at identifying what's wrong once it takes a screenshot.

A little January update: I am very tired, overwhelmed by all the agents, eating too many hobnobs, and willing myself back into the mindset of someone who knows how to research and write useful things. maggieappleton.com/now-2026-01

January 2026 | Maggie Appleton

Maggie's digital garden filled with visual essays on programming, design, and anthropology

maggieappleton.com

This is utterly unhinged in the best possible way. High praise for running a tour of the plane while it's a quarter-built and mid-flight. steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-g... Some choice excerpts.

Applies to some tools, but this is where fine design makes a difference. Code is cheap to prompt, but the real bottleneck to good products is thinking through 99,999 design decisions and considering every edge case. DIY-ing your own tools will teach you how hard beautiful, thoughtful design is

brennan@brennan.computer · 7mo ago

I think this is exactly the math that is going to drastically change the small SaaS landscape why would I pay monthly for <tool> when the same cost (maybe less!) can make that and also anything else I need

Context windows out to thwart all our beautiful dreams

One day I will write an ethnography about developers and their relationship to time. Specifically, speed. And milliseconds.