Knowing a little bit of computing used to put you far ahead. Now, we have plenty of programmers of all skill ranges, many of whom are really not at all notably

Knowing a little bit of computing used to put you far ahead. Now, we have plenty of programmers of all skill ranges, many of whom are really not at all notably useful with computers in any way other than hacking out apps. There's some truth to the idea that computers were more fun when they were opt in things! When they weren't everywhere, when everything didn't depend utterly on them! But I also think that we haven't meaningfully distilled out modern computing power effectively. Few of us are signifcantly more powerful computer enjoyers than we were, and if anything the blackbox mature of apps & the shift of more and more computing away from the Personal Computer to the great Data Keeps in the Cloud, where we have zero ability to touch or see, has demoralized & deinspired & de-potentiated baseline humans from where we were two decades ago. My hope is malleable software workspaces, better general systems where we can see the various ambient digital matter around us & start gluing together scripts & libraries. On the one hand there's good efforts like Node-RED or n8n on open source (which is long term probably a must). But just watching Gemini on the phone follow down the chatbot path, of trying to be a coordinator, able to hook into APIs offered by apps to control & orchestrate them: that integrative function of systems scripting systems has been utterly forsaken for the 30 year interregnum of the Application Uber Alles. Agency has been stagnant at best (waning hard), but we're in various ways starting to look more integratively at computing, and that has to mean more than the black boxes we users have been trapped inside of. Opening the doors of possibility again after so long, having a userodm that can steer themselves & do more & craft things again is exciting as heck. See of course Barefoot developers & home cooked software. Critically, I'd say it is framed in the old mindset of individual isolated bits of software, misses how computing is now compelled again to open its interfaces & let the outsider in via MCP, but it very much is about a re-empowered age of software & computing, an age of more open potential. https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40633029 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40633029 (322 points, 10 months ago, 173 comments)