Really enjoyed this distillation of the vision of malleable software that drives so much great work in our community today. Important point is that we need tools that titrate in programming continuously, so that users of all skill levels can adapt their tools and expert users can *really* build.

Geoffrey Litt@geoffreylitt.com · last yr.

New longform @inkandswitch.com essay! 📜 Malleable Software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps by me, @joshuahhh.com, @pvh.ca and @seaofclouds.com inkandswitch.com/essay/mallea... It's about why people need agency over their software tools, and how to make that happen.

BTW: I'm slowly assembling a LIVE Primer to help folk submitting to LIVE (& others) get the lay of the land. Please take a look and let me know what's missing, what sucks, what's rad, etc. live-workshop.github.io/primer/

New longform @inkandswitch.com essay! 📜 Malleable Software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps by me, @joshuahhh.com, @pvh.ca and @seaofclouds.com inkandswitch.com/essay/mallea... It's about why people need agency over their software tools, and how to make that happen.

Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps

The original promise of personal computing was a new kind of clay. Instead, we got appliances: built far away, sealed, unchangeable. In this essay, we envision malleable software: tools that users can...

inkandswitch.com

What if you didn't need git to collaborate on games? We've been prototyping a new approach to collaboration in Godot: live and async collaborative editing, with branches and diffs, built right into the editor. We're looking for people to test out an early version, see link in next post:

Man, this is such a beautiful video series. Seeing the amount of work it takes to build a good house is awe-inspiring. youtu.be/d7e6IOdKfVw?...

Building a Craftsman House [Start to Finish Timelapse]

YouTube video by Essential Craftsman

youtu.be

what if you could model a problem in a spreadsheet, and then instantly start applying powerful *filters* to explore your space of options? that's the idea @alexwarth.bsky.social and I have been exploring recently at @inkandswitch.com ... 1/

www.geoffreylitt.com/2025/04/12/h...

Stevens: a hackable AI assistant using a single SQLite table and a handful of cron jobs

geoffreylitt.com

Personal news: I’m a dad now! My wife and I are feeling very fortunate 😊

The Deep Research Printer: Say any question, get a custom printed report. The calmness of paper. The meditative quality of *actually reading*, not spawning a million tabs. Combined with the vast knowledge of the Web, answering our most niche curiosities.

Simple AI agent challenge: I want a report listing the remaining teams in the NCAA tournament (easy)... *with an embedded image of the mascot for each team* So far I've failed in Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Claude. Anyone know a service that can produce this?

One of my all-time favorite talks: how to write so people will care what you have to say. First watched it many years ago and I still think about it constantly. youtu.be/aFwVf5a3pZM

LEADERSHIP LAB: Writing Beyond the Academy 1.23.15

YouTube video by UChicago Social Sciences

youtu.be

verbally explaining to someone what to click on a screenshare is such a hilariously terrible experience. "click on the button in the top right that says... oh no not that one, move down, one more, oooone more.... ah you skipped it, go back to - oh nope, not quite..."

# avoid the nightmare bicycle

1/ here's a visual model for how AI support makes me better at UI prototyping with the surprising conclusion that AI may *improve* code quality in some specific cases! lets walk thru it step by step...

a tiny example of how AI speeds up UI prototyping: just used cursor composer + o3-mini to speed up a huge table with virtualized rendering. took a couple mins, worked on first try. no detour into math puzzles, no searching for a library. keeps me in flow!

pro tip: Claude Projects as executive function assistance i'm dealing with an international bureaucracy thing that's gonna take months... tedious but has to get done so i made a Project with docs explaining the process, now Claude tells me exactly what to do next and helps me do it faster 😎

Something new I’ve been hacking on with @alexwarth.bsky.social , check it out!

Alex Warth@alexwarth.bsky.social · last yr.

What if a spreadsheet cell could hold multiple values at the same time? That's the idea behind Ambsheets, a project I've been working on w/ @geoffreylitt.com at @inkandswitch.com. It's a new spreadsheet that makes it easier for you to explore many possibilities simultaneously. 1/2

It's riveting seeing how fast the "build vs buy" tradeoff is shifting in software. This is a perfect example from @randomwalker.bsky.social : he built a little reading app with ChatGPT, rather than trying to find an existing one. x.com/random_walke...

Sketchpad running on the iPad! (This is my plug for the @inkandswitch.com wrapper, check it out at github.com/inkandswitch...)

The latest Cursor Composer + Sonnet is accelerating me to a ridiculous degree these days—I'm feeling ~2-3x faster at executing major code changes. Makes trying new ideas feel so much lighter and worth doing.

what are your favorite examples of non-programmers building software using AI, that they wouldn't have been able to produce otherwise? @stevekrouse.com @robhaisfield.com @amasad.bsky.social I bet you'd have some good ones :)

Not usually an audiobook guy, but I’ve found one genre where they’re incredible: memoirs / first-person nonfiction, narrated by the author. The story comes alive, and it feels so natural that the person is telling their story.

A Montessori office: a calm space where adults of all ages can complete their daily tasks without interruption

Stuck at a hotel gym with unfamiliar equipment? Obviously ask Claude for a custom workout plan… Oh and one more thing: ask for an entire custom workout app that guides you thru the plan 😎

New blog post! About how using AI to build custom debug views can make it more fun to do the programming ourselves. www.geoffreylitt.com/2024/12/22/m...

AI-generated tools can make programming more fun

geoffreylitt.com

step 1 of writing a prolog interpreter: have Claude code me a custom debug utility that can visualize what my interpreter is doing :D already helped me fix so many bugs!

Q: at what age do you think humans become capable of solving this ARC puzzle? (given the first 3 pairs of grids, figure out the pattern and make the output for the 4th)

At @inkandswitch.com we are starting a new project to research better version control tools for making games. One hypothesis: collaborating on a game should initially be as simple as working on a Google Doc, with concepts like branching introduced gradually as needed.

one of the coolest live programming projects i've seen recently: super fun + some deep insights. you gotta check it out!

el@elliot.website · 2y ago

@joshuahhh.com and I invite you to explore our experimental visual programming environment (which takes place in a dungeon) Features - dissolve the bounds of decision and explore all possibilities at once - use sigillic incantations, delve into recursive caverns vezwork.github.io/drostes-lair-post

It’s funny how, given the right skills and mindset, cooking is easier *without* a recipe. Says a lot about how the world works: on the other side of the learning curve lies great simplicity