Maggie Appleton+

Ended up making a whole data vis for showing the massive number of deaths over t

Ended up making a whole data vis for showing the massive number of deaths over the course of the war. Three.js and canvas rendering 9000+ subtly moving 3D flowers here. Plus a lot of tricks to make it performant across devices. (though if you see anything janky, lmk)

Got a little too into making poppies for this reflection on great WWI novels and

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

Oh I don’t think it had access to the actual book content. But this one is so po

Oh I don’t think it had access to the actual book content. But this one is so popular/buzzy right now I knew lots of people had been writing about it online, including spoilers. If I’d asked about some less popular, less reviewed book I likely wouldn’t have trusted the Claude report

Tangentially a very good use of agents! “Look up the twist ending. Don’t tell me

Tangentially a very good use of agents! “Look up the twist ending. Don’t tell me what it is. But help me understand the nature of it: what level of gore? Any murder? Any chance I’ll have trouble sleeping after?” There was no way I was picking up a “thriller” without that filter.

…ruined the end for myself. But knowing the rough shape of how it ends makes me

…ruined the end for myself. But knowing the rough shape of how it ends makes me appreciate all the hints and subtle cues along the way of what’s to come. Doesn’t feel like I’ve ruined it at all. Makes me appreciate the story craft! The kind of book you could read twice and see new layers.

Obsessed with “Yesteryear”. So well written, funny, a necessary critique of the

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…

Oh that’s good to hear the format works!

Oh that’s good to hear the format works!

Forgive the ignorance, but what are managed agents?

Forgive the ignorance, but what are managed agents?

How is everyone managing their agent SKILL.md files? Is it just chaos? Global s

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?

Not sure I understand - each session here is its own branch. And you can make fo

Not sure I understand - each session here is its own branch. And you can make forks off of each branch. Or roll back to a previous commit. It's all just git under the hood. Or did you mean something else?

Unfortunately agents all have *awful* design taste. Even when when supplied with

Unfortunately agents all have *awful* design taste. Even when when supplied with detailed skill files on what I consider good design, there is still so much that can't be put into words: animations, interactions, taste, visual language. They faceplant in every category :(

Your new hobby seems to be being an extremely arrogant wanker to me and people

Your new hobby seems to be being an extremely arrogant wanker to me and people in my replies. Will leave this long enough for you to see it and then ✨✨✨BLOCKED ✨ ✨✨

Extremely jelly of everyone who have a set of clear, measurable, computable metr

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 😭

Yeah this is a nice workaround. You can also put specs in issues and then point

Yeah this is a nice workaround. You can also put specs in issues and then point an agent at it to do a draft PR. But still hard to have real team discussions in the comments of a PR or issue. Too slow and async.

You can read about why we built this and see lots more demos in the talk slides

You can read about why we built this and see lots more demos in the talk slides and transcript: maggieappleton.com/zero-alignment We're starting to roll this out to GitHub folks so we can squash bugs / make it less hacky. Then we'll do a public technical preview - there's a signup form in the link

Plans are also shared and editable as a team in real time. Because it is kind of

Plans are also shared and editable as a team in real time. Because it is kind of insane to make elaborate plans with your coding agent alone in your terminal without getting anyone else's input. And then send it off to be implemented without checking if it's any good.

It's multiplayer chats, plus agents, and everyone working in sandboxed vms so yo

It's multiplayer chats, plus agents, and everyone working in sandboxed vms so you're all sharing the same code and context. Prompt and code together, in real time. You're all connected to the same computer. You can all see the same outputs. No one is stashing work and switching git branches.

...multiplayer humans all have to be in the same workspace. At @githubnext.com

...multiplayer humans all have to be in the same workspace. At @githubnext.com we've made a new research prototype called "Ace" in this direction It's like Slack, Github, Claude/Copilot, and a bunch of sandboxed cloud computers had a baby. Some demos:

...communication that deeply integrate with coding agents Current versions of G

...communication that deeply integrate with coding agents Current versions of Github, Linear, Slack, etc. were built for a previous era of development. They're too isolated from agentic coding tools. Trying to duct tape coding agents onto them isn't working. Coding agents and realtime...

Got to talk at @aidotengineer.bsky.social conf last week about the need for coll

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...

Lol okay yes Continuous AI is a different GitHub Next project. It’s really good!

Lol okay yes Continuous AI is a different GitHub Next project. It’s really good! Customers love it. Sincerely. Genuinely *love* it. Has 80% WoW retention. Sounds like you don’t and that’s okay. Feel free to not use it Not what I’ll be talking about. But very proud of the rest of my team building it

Ah gotcha, looks like a separate research project happening at Microsoft / GitHu

Ah gotcha, looks like a separate research project happening at Microsoft / GitHub. It’s a big org. All kinds of research going on. Can’t speak to that one in particular. Not part of my talk. Showing a new prototype in this one focused on real-time human collaboration before agents touch anything.

Fudge bananas make mellow sounds with xylophones. Is a sentence that makes as m

Fudge bananas make mellow sounds with xylophones. Is a sentence that makes as much sense as your reply ☺️ In other words, what?

Yeah! Would love to come present and chat about it. Free whenever you want me.

Yeah! Would love to come present and chat about it. Free whenever you want me.

Yes! Will be on the AI engineer YouTube some weeks after: youtube.com/@aidotengi

Yes! Will be on the AI engineer YouTube some weeks after: youtube.com/@aidotengine...

Yeah current tooling is completely borked when you add agents to it. PRs showing

Yeah current tooling is completely borked when you add agents to it. PRs showing all their cracks. Going to be a rough few years transitioning to the primitives that come after it.

Sincerely, what is “GenAI script”?

Sincerely, what is “GenAI script”?

If you're at the conference, come say hello! I'm talking at 11am on Thursday, bu

If you're at the conference, come say hello! I'm talking at 11am on Thursday, but totally free and much less stressed every hour following that. Will be riding the post-talk-stress-high and happy to hang out.

Putting together the final touches on slides for my talk at AI Engineer conf thi

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 bo

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.

Oohh say more. I want this. How?

Oohh say more. I want this. How?

Whoaaa this is so much nicer than all the other floorplan software I had found!

Whoaaa this is so much nicer than all the other floorplan software I had found! Everything else hadn't been updated since 2001 and was genuinely unusable. This is great, thanks

I’m also doing a floor plan in Figma separately, but couldn’t figure out how to

I’m also doing a floor plan in Figma separately, but couldn’t figure out how to integrate it. Mostly using that as reference and to plan furniture layouts. Figured it doesn’t matter too much as long as the key info is written somewhere in the obsidian vault

Then told Opus 4.6 to design a system for me to manage within Obsidian. Said I w

Then told Opus 4.6 to design a system for me to manage within Obsidian. Said I wanted to manage: - budget and spending - essential house info - regular maintenance tasks - renovation projects - furniture research and purchases Told it to use Dataview and make dashboards for each main project

I setup an obsidian vault and braindumped what I wanted into a plan.md file init

I setup an obsidian vault and braindumped what I wanted into a plan.md file initially and the opened that in Claude Cowork. Messily listed out all the things I needed: projects to do, status of projects so far, contractors I’d already talked to, key house information, furniture to buy.

Yeah Dataview makes all the good stuff possible! The best part is I didn’t even

Yeah Dataview makes all the good stuff possible! The best part is I didn’t even need to learn much about how it works or query lang. Just told Claude what I wanted and it made it happen.

Dug through an old external drive last week and found a long lost gem! In high s

Dug through an old external drive last week and found a long lost gem! In high school I went through a phase of elaborately redesigning my desktop and keeping a screenshot record each time. Much skeuomorphism. Many novelty icons. I miss this time. https://maggieappleton.com/teenage-desktop

Every time I directly check the replies to my own tweets, up to 50% of them are

Every time I directly check the replies to my own tweets, up to 50% of them are new to me and didn't show up at all in notifications. Twitter is having lots of small, subtle system failures, but this one seems egregious. Whole conversations left hanging! Sacrilege!

If I re-listen it feels like being back at the exact physical location. Reverse

If I re-listen it feels like being back at the exact physical location. Reverse works too. I can run a route years later and specific places trigger podcast memories. Embodiment is wild.

Best part about listening to podcasts on a run is the strong visual-spatial memo

Best part about listening to podcasts on a run is the strong visual-spatial memory linked to points in the pod. Ideas live at locations. A point about debugging tools lives at the brick bridge. An idea for spatial interfaces goes with the blue corner house.

Logic extends to long form articles too. Idea guy puts "how to understand the Ch

Logic extends to long form articles too. Idea guy puts "how to understand the Chinese economy" into LM article generator. Posts it to the web. Other idea guys use their LM summariser to read bullet point list of banal takes on the Chinese economy. No one ever reads the article

Personal communication when we all have personalised language models embedded in

Personal communication when we all have personalised language models embedded in email. OG idea not mine. Saw something akin to this on twitter last week but can't find it now! Recreated for @bryankam@twitter.com Point me to the original if you know it.

If you currently dislike running because it's hard & it hurts you might be doing

If you currently dislike running because it's hard & it hurts you might be doing it wrong! Get a HR strap/watch and lots of audiobooks and slow jog like you're 80. Disclaimer: I don't race. I'm not a marathoner. I'm just want to have a good time and optimise longevity/QOL.

Switching from pace-focus to heart-rate-focus reframed everything. Used to tap o

Switching from pace-focus to heart-rate-focus reframed everything. Used to tap out at ~25mins but going slower makes it easy to do 60m. Default assumption before was always try to run faster = heart works harder = surely better? Very science. Turns out endurance is underrated

I've been running wrong for a decade 🤦‍♀️ It turns out if you run slower. Like,

I've been running wrong for a decade 🤦‍♀️ It turns out if you run slower. Like, *much* slower. You enjoy it more, run for longer, and improve all the good health shit and mental joy that running is for Used to aim for 5m/km average. Now I just try to keep HR around 150 BPM...

Doing another round of the Future of Code meetup in London! Feb 10th at @nwspk@t

Doing another round of the Future of Code meetup in London! Feb 10th at @nwspk@twitter.com If you're interested in making programming more accessible, humane, and weird, you'll fit in well here. If you're new to FoC, read more here: https://futureofcoding.org/ https://lu.ma/m44byo0a

Has anyone here set up or been involved in running an "unincorporated associatio

Has anyone here set up or been involved in running an "unincorporated association" / club / social society in the UK? Currently trying to suss out financial and legal implications of collecting a beer & pizza fund for a monthly community meet-up. Naïvely expected it to be simple

My design process in Figma

My design process in Figma

Watching my breath form inside the house and googling for fingerless heated glov

Watching my breath form inside the house and googling for fingerless heated gloves. Feeling the winter UK fail state vibes.

Mislabeled tools for thought on http://hive.one. (Almost) everyone on this list

Mislabeled tools for thought on http://hive.one. (Almost) everyone on this list is pursuing collaborative TFT and collective intelligence over personal. Which rogue LLM card sorted these community categories?

Thinking about using language models for reverse outlining when writing. There’s

Thinking about using language models for reverse outlining when writing. There’s a couple promising prototypes out in the world already - waiting for it to catch on in products and/or open-source tools. https://maggieappleton.com/reverse-outline

Watching language models become content-producing machines. Wondering how the we

Watching language models become content-producing machines. Wondering how the web will feel after we flood it with GPT-X articles, tweets, toots, and tiktoks Feels like we're heading into an ever darker forest. Wrote some tips for signalling you're human https://maggieappleton.com/ai-dark-forest

I’m a new year’s basic bitch. Wrote a dull, normie list of resolutions that invo

I’m a new year’s basic bitch. Wrote a dull, normie list of resolutions that involves getting better at climbing, writing, piano, and swing dancing. Cringe 😜

I treat @vitalyf@twitter.com's design guides as stand-ins for canonical patterns

I treat @vitalyf@twitter.com's design guides as stand-ins for canonical patterns. Some great ones: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2022/08/back-button-ux-design/ https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2022/08/error-messages-ux-design/ Content hubs like @smashingmag@twitter.com help centralise these But I can't help think of all the design craft & expertise stashed in private company docs

The centralised dream is probably misguided. Would be a burden to maintain (same

The centralised dream is probably misguided. Would be a burden to maintain (same problems OSS maintainers face), would need funding, inevitable infighting over design directions & project stewardship Decentralised chaos works almost as well... BUT IT WOULD BE GREAT. Pipe dream.

In some alt. utopia we'd have a single, massive, community-curated collection of

In some alt. utopia we'd have a single, massive, community-curated collection of UI patterns & docs with this level of care and attention There have been a few passes at it (https://ui-patterns.com/, https://goodui.org/, etc) but they're not maintained. Quality is hit or miss