Bro is starting off the year strong:

God, though, I understand why so many people are chasing that dragon, even though it’s going to ruin their careers, and maybe even their lives. I get why people fall for this, in spite of the externalities that they must know of by now. In spite of the colossal waste, the loss of fresh water resources, the fact that AI datacenters are the fastest growing source of carbon emissions, the people suffering sky-rocketing power bill and rolling outages near these new datacenters, the reams and reams of fascist propaganda these machines are producing to tear our society apart, the corruption, the market manipulation, the plain and simple fact that the ultimate purpose of these tools is to put their users out of a job entirely… well, once you finally get a taste of what it feels like to be great… I suppose all of those problems seem so far away.

Oh, dear.

Soon, we’ll feed requirements to AI and get working software without writing code. But when cars replaced horses, the horses never had to debug the cars.

Today we have thousands of apps to choose from, but it’s difficult to craft our own custom tools that do exactly what we need. Geoffrey Litt’s research explores malleable software: approaching software that feels more like a Lego set that anyone can combine to create their own tools, without programming. This talk will feature demonstrations of malleable software tools developed in contexts from travel planning to collaborative writing. It will also discuss how AI might enable a Cambrian explosion of custom tools created by non-programmers, and what kinds of new software environments will be needed to take advantage of that new power.

Great overview of Geoffrey’s work over the past few years and how LLMs could fit into the future of end-user programming.