Possibly my favorite cooking book ever!!

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.

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/

It's not a short read, we went deep on it -- but we tried really hard to keep it accessible to anyone who's curious.

Let us know what you think, and share with others if you like it :)

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...

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.

The key is you can actually explain what you want thoroughly and in detail, so it actually writes the code you want.

(And yes, I promise this can be much faster than coding by hand, in some cases!)

You may not like this answer, but one solution here is to do more coding thru an agent chat rather than autocompleting… it achieves a very different kind of “flow” but I find it much faster for certain tasks and less jerky than code autocomplete

How would you compare to o3?

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:

Crazy game

I like your point, but also the single mediocre undergrad works at 10-100x human speed sometimes which is a big deal!

Strong overlap between good craftspeople and life philosophers!

Building a Craftsman House [Start to Finish Timelapse] YouTube video by Essential Craftsman

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?...

02 · Filtering scenarios Using spreadsheet formulas to choose scenarios to focus on

we have lots more ideas cooking on ambsheets that we're excited to share - to subscribe to future updates and to see more details on filtering, check out our lab notebook post about this work! 6/6

www.inkandswitch.com/ambsheets/no...

you can also write any spreadsheet formula you want and use the result as a filter 😎

and, you can filter on *outputs* and filter "backwards" showing what inputs are compatible w/ that output!

eg: in this video we see what we can afford while staying under budget:

5/

this starts very simple: just check a box to focus down on a subset of the values in your sheet.

eg: "if i lease the cheaper car, what might my budget total look like"?

but, because we're in an open-ended spreadsheet, it can also get more interesting than that... 4/

one way to explore a space is *filters*.

we've all seen filters on shopping websites: you can use checkboxes, range sliders, etc to narrow down a list.

we can borrow from that familiar paradigm and bring it into our ambsheet. 3/

ok, first some quick background. we previously introduced our Ambsheets project: a spreadsheet where one cell can hold multiple values.

this creates a space of options... but wait, how do you explore that space? 2/

bsky.app/profile/alex...

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/

Yes, I remember loving it, that’s why I chose the name!

Yeah meal planning is next up for me too! Would be ideal to hook up Instacart automation but unfortunately that seems complicated.

lol yeah, it’s been a while since I read the book and I don’t really remember the details, I should revisit…

Oh weird! Thanks for heads up

Yes that’s fair! Have already seen a couple close calls with date / time zone confusion.

Wouldn’t rely on this yet as a sole source of info but I find it to be a nice extra layer

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

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

And I can happily confirm that vibe coding is the *perfect* tool for a sleep deprived engineer to hack on half-baked side projects in the middle of the night 👌

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?

In school why do teachers read your work?

“In school… you’re attaching a $100 bill to your paper, handing it to your instructor, and saying hey will you read this…”

Seriously just go watch the talk it’s so good