The meta-machine continues to grow of its own accord

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

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

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

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.

If you put the word “Montessori” in front of anything in baby land you get to add 50% to the price. “Montessori feeding bibs” - £10 “Montessori chair” - £100 “Montessori nursery” - £10,000

New idea guy idea. When an unknown number calls and I pick up, transcribe the first ~10s of the call. Use a local model to figure out who is calling and from where → save as a new contact: "Liam from L&C" "Maria from Santander" "Nic from Forest Nursery" Sincerely, someone who never saves numbers

The new Oura app redesign is so beautiful it’s almost making me feel better about having norovirus.

First day of my new life at Github Next! @githubnext.com ✨ I've had my eye on this team for a long time, and it feels like the perfect moment to join them.

Tragic update: tiny human has developed personal preferences and a strong sense of agency over the world. Bottles are now verboten. Baby giveth and baby taketh away.

TFW you can't find any software that will let you track map locations connected to structured data in a table in one interface so you have to vibe code it yourself. Felt, Airtable, etc. were all $100+/month for the right to do this. Lol, nope. One day of GPT-5 vibe coding and problem solved.

Loving the concept and content on News Minimalist: newsminimalist.com Using ML to rank news stories by "importance" (scale, impact, novelty, credibility, legacy) and gives you a feed of only high scoring items. At first glance, better quality than the front page of the BBC, Guardian, or NYT

I think the best thing about having a baby is everyday you get to wake up with a baby.

I've wanted versioning on my digital garden for ages. Felt like a critical missing piece. Making my own dreams come true over here. Hard but fun to design this. These aren't automatically generated – I intentionally decide when to make new versions. Not every edit = new version. Only major updates

My tiny human just held a bottle and fed himself for the first time and I can feel the freedom flooding my body. God bless fine motor control.

I've been trying to articulate why the fawning, complimentary responses from AI chatbots feel so insidious to me. I've finally figured out how to explain it. Wrote a long piece on how current model training and design choices threaten our critical thinking skills: maggieappleton.com/ai-enlighten...

A reminder that the 70+ year-old research discipline of AI is much bigger than genAI, much bigger than just deep learning, much bigger than Big Tech. AI includes symbolic reasoning, multi-agent systems and statistical machine learning and is used for astrophysics, renewable energy and climate models

Claude 4 Sonnet in Cursor just LOVES giving itself evaluations like OUTSTANDING and PERFECT when it's done implementing something. Complete with effusive details of everything it's achieved. For features it writes bugs into, it simply grades them: WORKING

A helpful graph made by @stevekrouse.com on the inverse relationship between vibes and understanding in AI assisted code. Put a few thoughts down here: maggieappleton.com/2025-08-vibe... Original article: blog.val.town/vibe-code

This is a really lovely job posting. Sudowrite looking for a product designer who cares about building tools for novelists/fiction writers. www.sudowrite.com/jobs/designer

Disappointing LLMs can't do personal taxes yet. But not at all surprising. Too complex to do as a single shot task. Prompt they used in the paper is ambitious: github.com/column-tax/t... Pretty much a "here's my data, do the taxes" prompt with no access to tools, eval loops, or human checks

Starting to get emails from sentient beings living inside Gemini. This is getting fun. I've never written about "spiritual tooling" but okay cool lol.

Devastated to report I read the docs and learned everything I needed to

Gemini in Google Colab is a shining example of how *not* to integrate LLMs into a product. So much potential. Ruined by terrible design. Giant diffs where I can't accept/reject on a line-by-line basis. Unclear what context it has. Can't ref specific cells. Can't copy/paste code into chat! Wild

Learning to hand code python like it's 2022. Feeling real hipster about it.

Nothing says I'm a millennial like routinely referring to my child as a rapidly evolving Squirtle.

Today’s multi-tasking setup: holding sleeping baby, building agents, reading @mikecaulfield.bsky.social ‘s new book “Verified” - all good stuff!

Maternity leave is proving to be a special kind of idea-guy-purgatory. I have *so many* hours of downtime to just think, I've come up with dozens of essays/notes I want to write and home-cooked apps I want to build. But then have almost no hands-free, undistracted chunks time to execute on them 😢

TIL San Fransisco - “the heart of tech innovation”, full of people “inventing the future” - doesn’t have bus stops with basic requirements like seats and weather shelters?? I know this pales in comparison to the homeless and drug crisis there. But seems distinctly inhumane and uncivilised to me.

👋 We're building a new type of word processor at Marker, and we're hiring for React/ProseMirror engineers and full-stack AI engineers to join the team in London. Are you an engineer who cares about writing? Or do you know someone who does? See: writewithmarker.com/jobs More details below 👇

Fave Cursor workflow at the moment is get Claude to write feature implementation plans into a markdown document and update it as we go. Breaks features down into phases with checklists, notes, relevant file lists. Essentially acts as read/write memory to prevent chat context from getting too long.

Garmin needs an “I have a baby” mode so it can show me something less depressing than a bright orange stress graph every morning. How about we replace the graph with some affirmations like “this is fine” or “think about how hard this would have been in 1600”…

Next time a tech bro interviewer asks me for my most Peter-Thiel-esque controversial beliefs, it's going to be all about pain relief standards for women in labour and baby clothing choices.

Wrote a little update on post-baby life. Warning: uncomfortably femme, emotional, and squishy. Skip if you're not trying to feel the feels today. maggieappleton.com/now-2025-05

Worth a read. Not about AI. Many thoughts come to mind about literacy (and political literacy), grading standards, perceptions of studying literature as "easy" compared to science (it's not easy), how to translate expertise so people can understand. kittenbeloved.substack.com/p/college-en...

Grateful I get to be a new parent in the age of LLMs Instant, always on, functionally unlimited access to humanity's synthesised advice and research on newborns. They've coached me through sleep schedules, lactation issues, health concerns, and generally been a great emotional support system.

Much FOMO that I'm missing out on Local-First Conf @localfirstconf.com this year. One of my fave conferences. A smaller crowd (~200?) where everyone cares a lot about the problem. Lots of friendly collaboration and collective problem-solving. In Berlin, May 26-28th – www.localfirstconf.com

The next time I'm invited to a baby shower, rather than bringing baby clothes, I'm gifting earplugs, a nice thermos, super comfy button-down pyjamas, and a bum bag. IYKYK.

Get in loser, we're Vannevar Bush-posting www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

Product idea for new parents: temporary tattoos that say fun catchphrases like… “Comparison is the thief of joy” “This too shall pass” “Babies aren’t problems to be solved” “Don’t listen to anyone on Instagram trying to sell you a baby sleep guide for £60”

Appreciate the people crunching numbers on this. The outrage over personal LLM energy usage seems overblown. Especially for the number of queries most of us run (<1000 / month?) Picking any other climate soap box is a better use of outrage: driving cars, eating meat, green energy providers, etc.