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.

Obsidian & Claude Cowork are doing all the house management and renovation tracking that I don't have brain space for right now. I ramble at Claude about things we need to fix in this very old and rundown Victorian we recent bought and it makes plans. Works great - both just operate on markdown.

God grant me the wisdom to understand the internal logic of the credit system

We have reached a moment where instead of releasing software you simply release the detailed spec for software and tell people to prompt their agent to build it themselves From the README of OpenAI’s new Symphony orchestrator: github.com/openai/symph...

What’s everyone’s physical labour backup career? I’m thinking family photographer. Maybe interior designer? I’m not good at either of those things… yet. But I reckon I could make it work if all white collar jobs melt down into the GPUs.

First full, uninterrupted night of sleep in 10.5 months. The baby finally got with the programme. It’s a brave new world.

The whole GitHub Next team is coming to London in March! And we're hosting a meet-up for anyone interested in the next generation of software eng tools Sign-up here → luma.com/v5eltkec?tk=... March 3rd at 6pm We'll show our recent work & research, but also have open spots for community demos

As a person with a liberal arts education, I’m egotistically biased to strong agree with this. But legit my whole day is just doing tons of critical thinking, meta thinking, and design thinking - the kind I learned in my crunchy lib arts school - in order to decide what to prompt the bots to make

A delightful feature of near-perfect-voice-to-text is that when my husband and I are pottering about at home, talking to our devices about work problems or baby things or side projects, we get lots of context on the things occupying each other’s minds…

TFW you talk to Claude to sharpen your idea and it’s like “yes, of course you have this idea. Bret Victor put this idea in your head a decade ago” I am a stochastic Bret Victor parrot.

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.